In The Mines

by Guede

Summary:

On the eve of a planned invasion of Wutai, Sephiroth is called to Corel to investigate some strange deaths. He never returns.

Ten years later, with the Wutai War dragging on under Generals Hewley and Rhapsodos, SOLDIER is again asked to investigate some unusual deaths in Corel and the mystery lands in Zack Fair’s lap.

Chapter 1: Past

“Paying attention over there, test tube wonder? These are real working conditions, not like all that gauze Hojo keeps you wrapped up in,” Heidegger snorts without looking back. He puts a hand out to slap at the wall and lets it drag a few inches behind him, then fall back to his side without seeing how he’s brushed dirt across the seat of his trousers. “Corel’s full of hard cases and you can’t let your guard drop for a second.”

“Of course, sir,” Sephiroth mutters with as much neutrality as he can muster. He’d turn his gaze away—the sight ahead is hardly one to linger on—but then he’d have to mind the messages lurking on his PHS, and neither they nor Heidegger are offering him anything resembling useful advice.

It is his first time out of Midgar proper, and even without the demands of his mission, he would have liked to study the place in more detail. But Heidegger is transparently uncomfortable with their surroundings despite it being Shinra’s local office and stomps on through the halls, barely even stopping to toss off his trademark insults to the unfortunate liaison tasked with showing them around. Sephiroth observes what he can, but even he can’t garner very much this way.

What he has gathered doesn’t deviate significantly from the available materials on Corel. It’s an old settlement and while its mineral wealth has ensured it rivals Midgar for population, its leadership has long since lost primacy. The Shinra office sits in the wealthiest and most developed part of the town, but the windowpanes are streaked with soot and the carpet is visibly worn. The personnel here look a little healthier than the few locals Sephiroth has glimpsed between the airport and the office, but they all carry themselves with a stooped, nervous manner.

Then again, that could be down to the company. Heidegger throws off a comment about the smell never washing out and Sephiroth sees a thin, pale woman in the room they pass hastily duck down. But then she raises her head again and she has a soiled handkerchief over her nose and mouth—Sephiroth has to turn away and placate Heidegger with another muttered reply, but he hears her soft coughing for several more steps.

“Here we are,” Heidegger says as the liaison gestures them towards a door at the end of the hall. He draws himself up with exaggerated nonchalance, then snorts away the liaison’s attempt to offer to go ahead. “No, no, let’s not bother with the warnings. Either the good doctor’s ready for us or he’s not—right, Sephiroth? You’ve got plenty of experience with doctors.”

Sephiroth musters a tight nod, not because he particularly cares to reinforce Heidegger’s tyrannical tics but because he has more than enough experience to know the man won’t stop asking. Once the President has established SOLDIER as a separate unit from Public Safety—he stops his thoughts there, and concentrates on keeping his expression as bland as possible under Heidegger’s deceptively jovial eye. He can’t give anything away, he reminds himself. Not until he has a success that no one else can claim.

Heidegger is a lout and an incompetent, but he has enough of a survival instinct that he does suspect something. They’ll need Corel running at full operational capacity if they’re going to have enough arms to invade Wutai, but that’s the kind of unglamorous logistical matter Heidegger normally would leave to a lackey. He’s only dragged himself out of his disgusting off-hours activities in Midgar to come along because he’s worried about Sephiroth gaining a separate power base, so Sephiroth can’t yet abandon caution.

“Well, let’s see,” Heidegger finally says, still looking at Sephiroth. His lips move together, then part in a faint, insinuating smacking sound. Then he turns around. “Don’t expect much. Hojo probably filled up your head about how doctors can invent anything out of shit, but that’s not what Valentine is like.”

The other man strides forward, carrying along the wincing liaison with him. He pounds on the door, then settles back with an anticipatory huff.

Sephiroth comes up more slowly. He has every intention of simply waiting behind Heidegger so they can get this check-in over with and get onto the actual inspections, but his PHS buzzes again and—he slips it out of his pocket behind Heidegger’s back. He knows who it is and why they won’t stop messaging, and knows also that it isn’t going to shift his intentions at all, and yet…

If you continue in this line, I’ll have no choice but to declare you a failure. You’re betraying your mother’s legacy.

In spite of himself, Sephiroth sucks his teeth between his breath. Then he clamps his lips together and jerks his head up, bracing himself for Heidegger’s knowing scorn.

He’s saved by the whining hinges of the door in front of them, which entirely swallow up his own sounds and prevent Heidegger from noticing his lapse. Then Grimoire Valentine, R&D’s lone scientist here and as of a week ago, acting head of the entire office, steps into the doorway.

“Grim!” Heidegger blusters, clapping his hand to the other man’s shoulder. “Been a few years—that research of yours never seems to clean up the mines but it cleans you up just fine. Maybe you should share that with the rest of R&D, you know, I think Hojo could use some.”

“Thank you for coming.” Grimoire Valentine is quite tall, taller than Heidegger and only a couple inches shorter than Sephiroth, and does look well-preserved for a man his age. Compared to the others in the office, he presents an almost shocking example of good health…except there’s something somber about him, even when he smiles politely. “The report was light on details so I’ll explain. Come inside.”

Valentine half-steps back into his office, turning to make room as Heidegger swaggers past him. He and the liaison make eye-contact and the liaison takes a step back; interestingly, they look not relieved, but concerned. They seem reluctant to leave Heidegger to Valentine, and it takes Sephiroth clearing his throat—the liaison is partly blocking his way—for them to snap out of it and scurry off down the hall.

“You are Sephiroth,” Valentine says. It’s not a question, but unexpectedly, it doesn’t appear to be an unfriendly gesture either. Valentine looks him in the eye while extending one hand, and the man’s gaze is devoid of the usual red flags Sephiroth is accustomed to seeing: fear, aggression, alienating curiosity. He is curious, but somehow he also conveys that it’s of the kind—of the kind that wants to see how Sephiroth acts, rather than what’s inside Sephiroth. Doubly strange for a scientist. “I’m Dr. Valentine, but feel free to call me Grimoire.”

“Grimoire,” Sephiroth says. He takes the man’s hand and has to work to not telegraph it when he feels calluses that are more in keeping with manual work than lab counters. And there’s a whiff of gun oil about the man too, though when they step apart and Sephiroth can see the rest of the man’s office, he sees no weapons. “I am. I suppose Dr. Hojo has spoken to you about me.”

“Can’t stop talking about what a marvel his genetic fiddle-faddle’s become,” Heidegger grunts. He’s already at Valentine’s desk, fingering some papers without bothering to ask permission. He moves one out of its folder, then flinches in disgust. “Damn. You should put a warning on this, Grim, keep a man from expecting something…”

Valentine’s gaze had flickered a little at Sephiroth’s mention of Hojo, but it’s not till he sees what Heidegger has that he looks genuinely perturbed. He takes a hasty step over and then plucks the sheet from Heidegger, but holds it out so that they can all view it. Heidegger makes a revolted noise and twists away.

It’s a photo of a woman. A dead one, though Sephiroth guesses that Heidegger had initially seen only the left leg, which is unmarked and shapely enough by common standards. But the rest of her is quite gruesomely unappealing.

“Didn’t think those coal rats left anything big enough around here to do that,” Heidegger says. His hand is shaking a little as he rubs it across his mouth, and to compensate he raises his voice. “They’ll toss anything into that rock-bottom stew of theirs. Mothers count their children at every meal for that.”

“No one willingly eats their children,” Valentine says, and somehow does it in such a soft tone that he comes off as apologetic in his correction. His eyes don’t match, but they don’t carry any fire either. “I have ruled out all the common types of local predators. I’ve checked against any monster type reported in the last ten years as well.”

Sephiroth tilts his head to account for the slight sheen of the photo under the light, then narrows his eyes. “Are you certain it’s some form of wildlife? That looks like a bludgeon wound.”

Valentine looks up at him, then offers the photo. When Sephiroth takes it, the other man reaches back to the desk and picks up the folder, then fans out a few more photos from it. “She had gotten into a fight earlier in the day, and had just been released from jail. They documented her fight injuries as part of processing and you can see…they shouldn’t have released her at that hour, not in her condition. They’re short-staffed for night shifts but it was still criminal.”

He says that in the same quiet, unaggressive tone as before, and his expression doesn’t change as Sephiroth studies him. Sephiroth finally drops his eyes to the photos, shuffling through them and then nodding. “Which one was this?”

“The second. She lived…between her and the jail, one of the older shafts can serve as a shortcut. It’s not active but they do maintain it for ventilation purposes. The first one was a miner, also going home in the same direction.” Valentine retrieves two more files and flips them open. He makes a quiet point with each to hold them out so if Heidegger wants to look, the man can, and then he passes them to Sephiroth once Heidegger scowls a negative at him. “After her, we put a guard on both ends. They didn’t see anything coming or going the night of the third attack.”

“Drunk, probably,” is Heidegger’s contribution.

“I’ve consulted the security cameras,” Valentine continues, with a polite look Heidegger’s way. “We do also have ground sensors for detecting shifts in the earth, but they’re sensitive enough…I don’t think that the attacker came out of that area to go after Henderson.”

Henderson is the late head of operations and as he also was the third reported death in the series, the reason why Valentine’s report had been elevated to the highest levels. Even those not sold on the conflict with Wutai know better than to stand by as Corel’s mines slip away. “I understand he was found in a different area, but were there any connections between the two?” Sephiroth asks. “I studied the maps we have—”

“It’s some mutant crawling up out of a Mako seep or something like that. You have enough people, don’t you? Just go through the place, find it and kill it. You shouldn’t need to come crying to the home office for that,” Heidegger cuts in. He slaps at the files in Sephiroth’s hands, then throws a venomous look over them at Sephiroth. “This is a waste of time. You should stick your head out of your lab once in a while and see what the rest of the company cares about.”

Sephiroth presses his lips together only a little harder than he is holding onto the files. This little scene is much more for Hojo’s benefit than his own, he realizes that, and what isn’t about Hojo is about Heidegger’s transparent insecurities. He realizes all of that, and also that the worst tactic he could deploy is giving the other man any indication that Sephiroth too cares about such irrational elements, and yet—and yet he wants to. He can reason why he shouldn’t but that doesn’t take care of the want.

“A special administrative order has to be in place for the miners to bear arms.” Valentine blinks once when Heidegger rounds on him, but to Sephiroth’s eye doesn’t seem at all surprised by the reaction. Nor do his words falter, soft though his tone is. “I do agree, an R&D person stepping into an Admin role is not a good fit. I can’t sign off on it, but none of the Public Security officers stationed here can either. I’m sorry you had to come out all the way here just for the paperwork, sir, but I didn’t want to contravene protocols.”

“Well, you’re—yes.” Heidegger fumes a few seconds, his throat reddening and swelling with suppressed embarrassment, before he shakes his head exactly like an overweight, jowly dog pestered by a fly Sephiroth once spotted in an alleyway. “Civvies should stay home where they belong, just leave it to—ah—we’ll have a meeting. I haven’t talked to the team here yet, I’ll do that.”

“Of course,” Valentine says. His lips move as if he means to tag on more, but he ultimately seems to think the better of it and holds his tongue.

Heidegger grunts uncomfortably, his small, squinting eyes darting this way and that about the office, never anywhere near the documentation Valentine clearly is sitting on. Then he shakes his head again and makes a move for the door. “Got to arrange that, and it’s getting late,” he says. “It was a long trip. First thing in the morning, and then you’ll get your orders about where to block people from getting in.”

It’s only mid-afternoon and all local officials who can be in the office today should be. They could hold the damned meeting now and actually make some headway in tackling the problem.

And as Sephiroth thinks that, Heidegger abruptly twists about to look at him. The man’s discomfort is so plain that Sephiroth almost misses the dark, ugly shadow of rage behind it. “Any thoughts to share, Commander?”

“Only that it may reassure people to see a little more of us today. We will need to plan this first, as you’ve pointed out,” Sephiroth says, doing his best not to swallow back his frustrations too obviously. “In the meantime, they’re frightened. I wouldn’t advise anything strenuous, merely letting them know we’ve come in person. It will calm them down so they don’t ask questions about—of us.”

For a moment, he isn’t certain if he’s struck the right balance. Pandering to R&D is unwanted second nature to Sephiroth at this point, but they at least are trained to follow a logical chain of argument. His first few clashes with Heidegger, he’d wrongly assumed that anyone with a military role must be similar and had suffered for it. Heidegger is far more driven by emotions, particularly his sense of shame and his hatred of it.

But then Heidegger suddenly leans back and smiles. “Photo op, eh? You grew up to learn politics after all,” he says. “I like it. We should do that, Valentine—there’s got to be somewhere serving something to drink. Nothing a miner likes more to take his mind off the pits than a good drink.”

A bar—Sephiroth quickly suppresses his dismay and keeps a blank expression as Valentine, looking no more overjoyed but also no more surprised, offers to show them down the street to a popular one. Sephiroth had only thought they could walk around the office a few times, and that that would give him some opportunity to continue asking Valentine questions while Heidegger mugged to the locals, but this…this is entirely predictable for a man like Heidegger. Entirely predictable, and the miss is entirely on Sephiroth’s head.

But it’s impossible to walk back his suggestion now, so all he can do is come along like a tame pet as they leave the office. Heidegger at least stops talking to him as soon as they enter the bar, instead showering the bartender with off-color joke after joke and never mind how many of them make the other occupants look askance at them. The place is half-empty since it’s between shifts, but there are still enough people to create a palpable sense of distaste in the air.

Admittedly, the feeling is reciprocated. Sephiroth wouldn’t wish Heidegger on anyone, but this bar is barely more than a converted garage, with walls and floor of pitted concrete and gritty black dust everywhere. The top of the chair Sephiroth touches has an unpleasant stickiness to it that makes him hastily withdraw his hand and instead move along the wall towards what appears to be a short hall to the toilets, and hopefully a back door. Heidegger is already halfway through one drink, and if he’s busy enough, perhaps Sephiroth can simply excuse himself for a call of nature and not come back.

“The cleaning solution the miners have to hose down with before coming into the office is very harsh and it lasts, so it’s not worth upgrading anything this close. When they go to places closer to the mines, things don’t wear out as fast even if they’re washing them more often.” Valentine pauses there, noting Sephiroth’s irritation, and then dips his head slightly. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. I’m too used to trying not to set off a cave-in.”

Sephiroth had been aware that Valentine had come in with them, but then had lost track of the man in focusing on Heidegger. He’s irritated at himself only, and does his best to hide that as he nods back. “We’re not here to overhaul your protocols,” he says, twisting slightly so that he’s angled towards Valentine instead of the bar counter. “I’m not. I’m here to investigate these alleged monster attacks.”

Valentine draws in a slow breath while looking down the bar where Heidegger and the bartender are. Again, he doesn’t seem surprised, but he does sound slightly more…as if having Sephiroth in opposition is a troubling thought to him. “I don’t usually drink,” he says after another moment. “But I was going to buy a coffee before going back to the office. It is a little better outside.”

“I’ll have one as well,” Sephiroth says, and then attempts what various psychological studies have declared a neutral smile. “I say alleged not to deny the facts, Dr. Valentine, but to avoid jumping to conclusions about the cause. I try not to do so before I think I have all the facts.”

Of course those studies were carried out on average people, not on someone with Sephiroth’s height and looks, and so he’s long since resigned himself to being treated with exotic fascination at best. But unusually, Valentine gives him a thoughtful look and then gestures with one hand towards the back hallway.

A second drink is in front of Heidegger by the time they edge into it. The back door leads into a short deadend alley so they have to cut back around to the front of the bar. Heidegger’s grating laugh is clearly audible from there and while that’s a good sign, Sephiroth can’t stop himself from tensing at it.

“Do you answer to him?” Valentine asks. Then sighs as Sephiroth turns to him. “I am out of the way here, and I confess I have very little personal interest in politics. I often find it far easier to be forgotten.”

“I am part of Public Security—SOLDIER sits within that department, although we do have a degree of autonomy in day-to-day matters,” Sephiroth says. He’s clipped about it, and doesn’t attempt to disguise that. “To the extent you have concerns that he may take my actions out on you—”

“Oh, I have no concerns there. That is, he undoubtedly will, and I won’t hold it against you,” Valentine says. The words are flippant but something about his manner mismatches them; he’s quite serious despite the diffident shrug he gives. “This is Corel, and I’ve been here longer than you’ve been alive, Commander. There is very little Heidegger can use to punish me at this point—but I’m rather beside the point anyway. I do see the drawbacks in being forgotten when it comes to incidents like this, and if someone is offering help to the people here with that, I’m willing to accept it.”

Sephiroth looks more sharply at the other man, who doesn’t appreciably change his behavior once he’s noticed. They go a little further down the street, to a slightly nicer storefront housing a coffeeshop. But the inside is nearly as barebones as the bar, with the only visible sign of personality besides the brewing equipment being the mosaic floor, which appears to be made out of broken pieces of the same mugs they’re offered.

Once they’re served, the lone barista disappears into the back of the store. No one else is inside so they take seats along the bay window—there are no chairs—and Valentine pulls out a map from his pocket. He unfolds that and smooths it against one knee.

“We closed the tunnel here after the first two,” Valentine says, showing Sephiroth the place on the map. “It was quiet for about thirty-six hours, so the thought was whatever it was, it might not need to feed every day. The guard had orders to contain anything but not proactively engage it.”

“Because of the lack of arms?” Sephiroth asks.

Valentine tilts his head. “In all honesty, most of the miners have something for self-defense. It’s hard to police, and if we did, there’d be more casualties for day-to-day operations than the medical staff could handle. The Public Security officers are posted aboveground, and by the time they can come down for your average monster, someone is already dead.”

Sephiroth finds himself frowning a little, less at the confession than at how frankly and unflinchingly Valentine delivers it. The man looks directly at Sephiroth, but at the same time, his gaze lacks the aggression of a challenge. Which is not so dissimilar to Midgar R&D, Sephiroth thinks.

“But guns are dangerous underground. You could hole a pipeline, or strike a spark where there are flammable gases, or just set off a rockfall. Nobody is eager to use one.” Valentine regards Sephiroth for a moment. He doesn’t show whether he’s happy or otherwise that Sephiroth isn’t charging him with treason. “It was clear from the defensive wounds on the first two that no one was going to win a wrestling match with this one either. If guns were needed, then Public Safety would need to go in, and Henderson wanted to lead in person in that case.”

The man still smells a little of gun oil, and Sephiroth can distinguish that from other common types of engineering lubricants. But he keeps that to himself for now and only nods. “That seems conscientious enough.”

“Henderson’s mother was from here. He knew the mines, and he knew not to forget their influence on anything happening in one.” For a moment Valentine’s voice drifts and Sephiroth almost thinks he’ll have to shake the man to make him focus, but then Valentine does that himself. “He couldn’t afford to do that till the weekend. In shaft one-eighty, here—” he points again at the map “—we had to vent out a gas pocket and that is very delicate work that you can’t simply stop in the middle of and then take up again whenever you want. He wanted to finish it first.”

“You heard this directly from him? Or you’re theorizing,” Sephiroth says. “I saw that you have an engineering background, but your current research—”

“—is a useless pile of mystical mishmash, or so I was told, the last time Midgar bothered to review it.” Valentine smiles a little as if this is somehow an amusing rather than a humiliating memory, and then he sighs again. He reaches over to adjust the map against his knee, and his sleeve pulls up slightly to show scar tissue running up the back of his forearm. It’s only a glimpse, but it looks old, eroded foothills rather than crisp mountain ridges. He doesn’t seem self-conscious about it, and when he stops moving his arm, the sleeve slides back down. “They cut my budget but didn’t cancel it altogether, and my research isn’t very expensive anyway. It also isn’t most of my day—I do help out with the engineering, and I was working on the gas pocket bypass with Henderson. I don’t tackle monsters or security issues, or at least I didn’t before he died, Commander. But he did tell me a little bit so I knew why we had to move up the schedule.”

Valentine’s HR file doesn’t mention anything about current engineering work, much less a role that sounds very much as if it explains why Corel’s critical mines haven’t had a new chief engineer assigned to them in over five years. It does make Sephiroth consider what else in his background research is wildly out-of-date, but he lets that thought run in the background for now. “I see. And then he was killed on-site.”

“Not on-site. Near, but not on,” Valentine says with a frown. He spreads the map with one hand and moves the index finger of the other over it, then sighs with audible frustration. “These maps are impossible to keep up to date, and this one is better than the one I know you had access to in Midgar…the problem is they only show active features, for the most part.”

Sephiroth had started to suspect as much as soon as Valentine had mentioned the shortcut tunnel. He’d pored over the map in Midgar and hadn’t remembered any such way, but then, he’d also not thought to look for anything but the most recent version. There had been older versions available that he had discounted, and he makes a note to himself to see if they can be downloaded from an office terminal.

“They close up shafts all the time, but when we say ‘closed’ around here…it’s expensive to do it per code. Expensive and also extremely difficult to undo, and sometimes you find the seam twisting back on itself, or the way that the earth shifts makes you move your supports.” That faintly distant air comes into Valentine’s voice again, though when Sephiroth checks his face, the man seems focused enough. “I won’t pretend that cramming it with gravel instead of piping in concrete does much for stability, but I can see why they do it. And these mines are so old, if you started faulting them on that, you’d be faulting entire bloodlines.”

“So there is a connection,” Sephiroth says.

Valentine’s finger moves on the map. “Here, where we found him, there’s a very small ventilation shaft, not big enough for anything more than a cat. It runs the opposite way, but here, at this point, it crosses a closed-off tunnel and this would let you move around. This was where they ran the trolley at one point. But it’s still not a direct path between the two and you’d be taking a very long way around.”

Sephiroth starts to ask a follow-up, but then quiets himself as he studies the map. He’s aware that that is a fool’s errand given Valentine has confirmed its inaccuracy, but he still…he still would rather pour his energies into this, into actual meaningful work with a hope of applying his skills to further something beyond another’s ego.

He almost smiles to himself, even before his damned PHS buzzes again. He should know better; he’s not yet twenty but he’s already had a lifetime stifled under Hojo’s grasp, and he knows better how freedom is a relative matter.

“You seem persuaded that this isn’t an animal of some kind.” Valentine pauses as Sephiroth looks sharply over at him, then moves his hand in a placatory gesture. His scarred arm slides out of his sleeve again, and this time Sephiroth sees that the scars are long and thin, and all running the same direction. “I’m not mounting an accusation. We’re isolated here, but I’m not entirely insulated from…I just want to stop another attack from happening.”

“Understood,” Sephiroth says. He realizes he’s leaned far over the map and moves back, trying to reduce any unintentional intimidation by his posture. “Are there…reasons why it being a monster is the better option?”

The other man grimaces. His gaze floats over Sephiroth and to the street-facing window, causing Sephiroth to take a hasty peek outside, but there’s no sign of Heidegger or, indeed, anyone. Valentine simply seems to be thinking. “I’m not a politician, or that versed in security matters—it was only coffee talk with myself and Henderson, up until he died,” he finally says. “I can say you’re not wrong to consider the local mood, but…I wouldn’t want to claim any kind of influence over security decisions. That’s why Heidegger is here in person, I take it.”

There’s an implied rebuke in the man’s words, and not only because it belies his claims to not track the currents. Sephiroth had meant his earlier suggestion more as a tactic to find some way to ask his own questions, but he’d be a fool to disregard how historically restive Corel has been and how Midgar would respond to any stronger signs of revolt. Has been a fool, knowing as he does how he’d advise a response to the President.

But Valentine doesn’t press home the point, and in fact seems to deliberately shy away from the scratch he’s drawn. “From a purely pathological standpoint, I stand by my analysis that this doesn’t match any of the currently known monsters in the area,” he continues. “I’ll also grant that a human hand could be behind it even if the attacker is an animal. But there’s no evidence for any of that, and I can’t opine in a vacuum.”

“That doesn’t stop most,” Sephiroth ventures, and finds himself irrationally pleased when Valentine’s expression clears to something at least amused, if not warm. “I take the point, and I’m not mounting accusations either. But I am trying to sort out the facts, and so far I can’t see much of a reason from this why the first two attacks happened. But the third one, your friend Henderson—the gas bypass was obviously an important operation.”

Valentine draws back a little. Not physically but in his manner, particularly the way he studies Sephiroth. “We did complete it,” he says, and then pauses. “I like to think I worked well with Henderson, but I wouldn’t claim to—you can check that easily enough, I see no point in putting up a false face. He never officially appointed me to anything outside of R&D.”

Sephiroth resists the urge to grimace. He is capable of managing complex social interactions, he has tested clear of every concern any psychologist has ever raised about him, and then gritted his teeth through plenty of inane social events to provide the field evidence. That’s something Hojo was never able to make stick to him, and a significant part of why he was able to present a case for roles outside of R&D—and yet a simple conversation is constantly slipping away from him. “I—”

“I keep putting my personal worries into this.” Valentine shakes his head, then puts one hand up to brush the hair out of his face. His hair is only sprinkled with white at first glance, but the movement betrays considerably more white under the top layers. “I hunt so I do know the local wildlife, but I’m not really a forensic pathologist, and I would be speaking outside of my expertise to go any further. I filed a report because I do think we need additional resources to properly look into this. Do you want to see the bodies, Commander?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth says firmly, before he can misspeak further. “Yes, I would.”

* * *

They make a token stop back in the bar, but find Heidegger well-ensconced behind a small fortress of beer steins and a passive-faced waitress the bartender has produced from somewhere. He’s more than happy to accept Sephiroth’s muttered excuse of going back to the office to catch up on paperwork, and outright dismisses Sephiroth for the night.

Newly unencumbered, Sephiroth follows Valentine to the morgue. It’s a small, airless room in the basement of the local office, with grinding machinery somewhere nearby that seeds a nascent headache in Sephiroth’s skull, but it’s reasonably well-equipped. Sephiroth immediately dons gloves and picks out a forceps and a few other tools from the autoclave tray, then turns sharply as Valentine moves in his peripheral vision.

“Sorry about that.” Valentine pauses and raises his empty hands, then gestures cautiously towards something under the equipment table. When Sephiroth, frowning, steps aside, Valentine goes down onto one knee and then pulls out a keyring. “Sample processing is down the hall, and the vibrations are bad for electronic locks, but I thought it’d be better to keep the report together with the bodies.”

“I thought you said you aren’t a pathologist,” Sephiroth says. He shifts over to make more room for the other man, but stays to watch instead of going over to the bodies.

Valentine grunts, then twists at the waist. His hand drifts back to dig its heel into his side; his clothing is too thick to make out much even when pulled tightly against his body, but Sephiroth still detects some irregularities, likely from more scar tissue. “I’m not. We do have one, but they’re on the medical staff too, and today they’re on rotation down in Number seven—here.”

He pushes a set of files up onto the table by Sephiroth’s left side, then ducks down to lock up again. Sephiroth slips a fingertip under one and flips it open. Standard formatting for the report inside, even if it’s handwritten rather than printed off a computer. He skims it and is opening up the second file when Valentine backs out from under the table.

“Here,” Valentine says, handing over a thick stack of gauze pads. He leans the other way, then slides over a wastebin with his foot. “I can try to answer what I can, and can leave a note for when the rotation team comes back up for anything I can’t. But that won’t be till close to midnight.”

“Noted,” Sephiroth says. He pulls out the second report and starts to read it. “I may not need them. These are decently-written, and I have some training myself. I won’t need any assistance looking over the bodies.”

“No doubt you have better skills than myself and wouldn’t ever cut yourself on accident, but in case you need to dispose of anything, the second door from the lefthand side goes to the furnace room. It is locked during business hours, but after six the staff prop it open because they’re in and out all night. I don’t think there’s much of a schedule to it, but I’ve never asked them.” Valentine says that in a distracted way, checking his PHS at the same time. He scrolls to something on it, pursing his lips, and doesn’t look up at Sephiroth for another handful of seconds. When he finally does, he looks startled and then wary, but in a strikingly regretful way. “I…have had a call from Hojo about you.”

“Even if your research is in an entirely different area, he’s very—concerned about the proprietary nature of his work,” Sephiroth says, feeling his lips curl in disgust. But he keeps his head high and his eyes leveled at Valentine. “I am, along with any biological derivatives, covered by—”

“You can study a person but that doesn’t reduce them to subject matter.” Valentine speaks calmly but with certainty. His voice doesn’t rise but Sephiroth falls silent anyway, and then Valentine fails to look triumphant about that. “He called me and reminded me of the protocols I think you were about to cite. I’m familiar with them, and have pledged to abide by them, as I would any department protocol. I said as much to him. But they don’t have any provision that requires me to take a sample when one is not volunteered, and it isn’t my area of research. You can make use of the furnace or not, I leave that decision to you.”

He studies Sephiroth for a moment, then turns and moves towards the door. At that Sephiroth starts, but then clamps down on the garbled, thoughtless exclamation—he needs to think about this. This is not what he’s used to—he can’t allow himself to be taken by surprise, he can’t ever afford that. He may be presented with surprises but he always needs to be fit to deal with them—he thrashes away the increasingly incoherent thoughts as Valentine turns back and looks expectantly at him.

“I appreciate that, but you can’t mean carte blanche to toss anything into the furnace,” Sephiroth finds himself remarking. “I could toss something from one of the corpses in there.”

Valentine blinks as if this hadn’t been part of his considerations, as if all he’d been thinking about when he’d offered up the information was whether Sephiroth was worried about him stealing samples of Sephiroth’s cells. But he adjusts quickly, sighing along with his shrug. “I suppose you could, but as a delegate from Midgar, you have the final authority to decide what we do with these.”

That is a little strange, Sephiroth initially thinks. He had read Valentine as genuinely being concerned about the other locals, but…but then, having Midgar forcibly bury matters must be a common occurrence. Even if Valentine doesn’t like it, he’s likely dealt with it before, and all indications so far are that he prepared for this visit. He might not have expected Sephiroth to say that, but he must already have made plans for them wanting to make this all disappear.

Which may or may not be where Sephiroth’s own inclinations lie—but he isn’t going to let these bodies vanish without understanding for himself what happened to them, and whether it’s likely to jeopardize his best chance of shaking off both Hojo and Heidegger’s claims on him. He should focus on that, and never mind Valentine’s philosophical positions; after all, the man can’t help him in Midgar or Wutai, so they’re meaningless outside of this room.

“I’ll need an hour or so. That takes us to…” Sephiroth pulls out his PHS to check the time, then hastily swipes away the notifications crowding under the glowing digits “…about six or so. I should rejoin Heidegger for dinner.”

“He should be coming back to my office whenever he tires of the bar. Do you remember how to come up?” Valentine asks. When Sephiroth nods, the other man starts towards the door again. Then he stops and looks back. “Shift change is at five-thirty, but I don’t need to follow that and I’m usually working till eight. If you do have questions after dinner, feel free to find me.”

Sephiroth thanks the man and then watches as Valentine exits the room. He waits till the door is firmly closed behind the man, then turns back to the reports. Then he finds himself looking up again at the featureless door, while his hand smooths blindly over the first page. That was as good as an invitation, he thinks. Valentine might expect the worst, but in a muted, diffident way, he seems to hold out a little hope that Sephiroth may at least drop some hints about next steps. He won’t go publicly against Heidegger but he’s not averse to backchannels.

Something here is of interest, and from what Sephiroth knows of people, he can’t take it as simple concern for others. But Valentine did send in a report, and did do it in such a way that it couldn’t be ignored—he could have tried harder if he’d wanted to downplay Henderson’s death, but instead he’d chosen to highlight possible connections between three deaths. He has an agenda. He can signal his disapproval of Hojo, but that doesn’t change that.

The reports. Sephiroth looks back at them, and then reads each over carefully before he finally shucks the forceps from its sterilization package and goes over to the bodies. Then he goes back to the reports once he’s done an initial examination.

From what he can tell, the write-ups are accurate enough. They’re dispassionate but they do seem to have done as close an inspection as the circumstances allowed; the morgue has physical tools but doesn’t appear to have equipment for more than rudimentary chemical testing. Then again, there are labs on the upper floors…Sephiroth makes a note to himself to ask after that, since there are no significant chemical test results appended to the report.

Then he stands and frowns at the papers. Something else seems to be missing. He reads through the reports again, looking for discrepancies, but then stops halfway through the second one because he knows that won’t yield anything. He’s already checked that way and he’s only second-guessing himself now, rather than truly tackling the problem.

Sephiroth twists on one heel and takes a step forward, then stops and stares at the corpses. Each of them has fatal injuries consistent with a physical altercation, and unless it was a very impressive costume, Sephiroth has to admit that claws and teeth are the likely weapons. If there was a human element, like an initial wound or drugging…but the defensive wounds they have indicate that any such prelude didn’t incapacitate them that much. They were able to go into the fight with the ability to—

He tilts his head. A miner, a woman with a known history of disorderly conduct, and a mid-level engineering executive. None of them were trained fighters, unless that was a deliberate omission from their profiles, and yet…Sephiroth takes another step, which brings him up to the side of the nearest body. Then he bends over it with the forceps.

Chapter 2: Past

When Sephiroth emerges from the morgue, he’s spotless and doesn’t have anything to throw into the furnace. He even stops in a bathroom on a higher floor to rewash his hands and rid them of the harsh alcoholic sting of sanitizer, but even with that much care, he can’t avoid Heidegger needling him through dinner about how the morgue must bring back fond childhood memories for him.

Dinner’s only saving grace is that Heidegger is still drunk, and once sufficient food is in the man’s belly, rapidly dives into the sleepy phase. He totters off towards their lodgings—also in the office—and Sephiroth stops in another bathroom to scrub his hands till they hurt.

He’s drying them when his PHS goes off, and against his better wishes his eyes track to the message: Being a soldier is a fool’s errand. You could live up to your mother’s legacy and climb to the skies but you’re settling for licking mud off boots.

Sephiroth snarls and jerks backward. Then catches himself, grabbing the PHS off the sink counter and looking all around himself even though he remembers he’s alone in the room—alone on the entire floor after Heidegger had gone down with the last of the catering staff. That disgusting, manipulative, lying—but Hojo knows exactly how he shaped Sephiroth, damn him, and knows what words will best slip through.

But even he has to answer to someone, and if he can’t deliver a soldier to best Wutai, he and his damned stories about enhanced evolution won’t have anywhere to go but the gutter. If Sephiroth can be that soldier, then he can say to the President that the Jenova Project is completed and they don’t need Hojo anymore. He can say that he’s made his mother—

He exhales. Puts his PHS away, brushes down his uniform, sniffs the air, and then he goes to find Valentine.

“I want to understand the timeline,” Sephiroth tells the other man. “How long did it take them to die?”

“We have security camera footage, but not of the actual attacks,” Valentine says.

He studies Sephiroth for a moment, then explains that they’ll have to go to the security offices to access the footage. These are located several floors below, but Sephiroth confirms his interest so Valentine walks him down.

Sephiroth detects more than a little curiosity coming off the other man, but Valentine holds in any questions. Once or twice he does look over, but it seems more in expectation that Sephiroth might quiz him, and again Sephiroth finds himself thinking how strange Valentine is. He’s used to other people being wary around him, but in very different ways and for very different reasons.

It's a very long walk through the corridors, and a very silent one. Idle chitchat is not a skill Sephiroth has ever desired to pick up, even if it reinforces the ‘inhuman’ impression he gives people, but he finds himself itching at the quiet. “I think it’s unlikely that a full team will be sent in, even if Heidegger decides to back it,” he finally says as they stand in the elevator. “We’re in the middle of—”

“Preparing for war,” Valentine says, and with enough dismay that Sephiroth looks closely at him. “Not my area, I’m aware.”

“But you disapprove?” Sephiroth says, and then remembers something from the man’s file. “You have a family connection there.”

Valentine winces. It’s a rough, sharp movement, quickly controlled but nevertheless carrying enough force behind it that the man’s earlier claim to hunting as a hobby suddenly fits. Then he sighs. “My late wife was from there, yes. But after she died, I lost any…well, to be honest, they didn’t care very much to be linked to me in the first place, and had no reason to do so without her around.”

There’d been a son too, but Sephiroth does know enough of social etiquette to not bring that up. “I see.”

The elevator finally lurches to its destination. Valentine puts a hand to the wall to steady himself, then shakes his head. “I dislike war as a concept. But you’re not here for a philosophical discussion with me, Commander, and so I won’t impose my views on you. I do understand that it’s hard to spare personnel for anything else right now, and if things are bad enough to demand it, then war won’t be a concept here but a reality. I don’t want that either.”

“No reasonable person should,” Sephiroth says, following Valentine out of the elevator. He detects some surprise in the man’s backward glance and smiles thinly. “I am a military professional, Dr. Valentine. War isn’t something to be started lightly, I think we can both agree there. If I can understand the nature of your problem better, we may be able to be surgical about this and avoid that.”

Valentine inclines his head slowly, then unlocks the door. He uses another metal key rather than the keycards that nearly all of the Midgar facilities use, so Sephiroth is mentally prepared when the man tells him the footage can only be sorted by date and hour.

“That’s fine, I only want to understand the duration of the attack. I don’t need image analysis capability,” Sephiroth says as he sits at the terminal. The relevant files are already pulled aside into their own folders, and the naming system is very straightforward.

“Why?” Valentine asks. “Forgive me, but I can’t see how this proves a human or an animal cause.”

“It doesn’t. But I’m not trying to determine anything about the attacker. I’m trying to determine something about the victims.” Sephiroth opens up the folder for the first one. Three files are inside and he clicks through them rapidly, determining that each one runs about two hours. “They all have multiple injuries that should have been instantly fatal, but I can tell that they’re layered—the attacker kept attacking. Why would they need to do that unless the victim was still fighting, and if they were…then I think the human versus animal discussion has at least two subparts to it.”

He starts the first file and lets the video player pop up, but he expects it to be well before the attack and so is paying far more attention to Valentine. Whose reflection on the screen shows he’s looking at Sephiroth and not distracted by anything else, but who doesn’t seem to appreciably react. That is very strange, and a moment later Sephiroth hits pause and twists around to look up at him.

“You can understand why I failed to mention this in the report,” Valentine says, as soon as they lock eyes but without any nervousness. He looks regretful, but not for planning for this; he only looks as if this is generally an undesirable situation. “Or to either of our superiors. Corel works hard, Commander. Its reputation as a hotbed of revolt is only because it’s a hard way of life here, and even harder when you see the wealth go out and little come back, but people don’t want to fight if they don’t have to. They will if they see an R&D team coming in to take their family away.”

Sephiroth finds himself frowning, and then finds a reply coming to his lips that—he stops that and makes himself think. He’s reading more into Valentine than he should; the man may genuinely feel what he says but that has nothing to do with Sephiroth’s own feelings, should have nothing to do with them. He’s not here to feel, he’s here to act.

“I’m not advocating to ignore this, or pretend that people aren’t dying. They are. But they still look like someone’s sister, brother, father, and so this can’t be public without turning into a war in the place you don’t want it,” Valentine adds.

“Then you want to deal with this, but quietly—and you don’t want R&D to have the remains,” Sephiroth guesses.

He adds on the last part more from instinct than logic, but sees he chose the right tactic when Valentine sags ever-so-slightly in relief. “Yes. The deaths are hard enough, and I think you have more than enough advantages over Wutai without—whatever is going on here. It needs to be stopped. It doesn’t need to be saved and reproduced and—and redeployed.”

If Sephiroth were to adhere strictly to protocol, he should report Valentine now and then take measures to secure the setting for a full investigation. But then, if he does that, he’ll not only be touching off social unrest and drawing resources from the preparations for Wutai—which alone would delay his goals—but he’ll be giving Hojo a reason to drag him back into the laboratory. He’s not the only living survivor of Project Jenova but he’s by far the most optimized and functional one, and that is how he’d persuaded the President that it was a waste of resources to continue paying Hojo to fiddle with him.

So he makes up his mind. “What do you know about this, Dr. Valentine?”

Who takes in a short breath and then lets out a longer, slower one as he considers Sephiroth. “Both of the first two reported sick the week before they died—dizzy spells, fatigue. The woman reported blackouts but due to her drinking problem, I don’t think the clinic took it seriously. The man’s supervisor sent him home early the day he died because of behavior issues when he had a clear record before. I talked to the supervisor and he said it was like a completely different person came in.”

Sephiroth nods. “And Henderson?”

Valentine grimaces. “He kept it very quiet. I don’t think anyone besides myself and his wife knew, and I only did because he had a—he had a spell in front of me, when he suddenly seemed…like someone else was in his body. I suppose now you want to know why he still was working on the gas pocket.”

“If it’s relevant to what you think is going on. Otherwise I’m not interested. I’m not here to investigate your chain of command, only these deaths,” Sephiroth says.

For a moment he thinks Valentine is going to explain anyway, but then the other man glances to the screen instead. “After they died, I did look at the footage, what we had—it’s in the second file, at the forty-third minute to the fifty-seventh.”

“Forty…” Sephiroth looks at him rather than changing the file. “Over ten minutes?”

“It’s a decommissioned tunnel so the cameras don’t run through it, but they’re at either end and they do have sound,” Valentine says. He reaches over with a look at Sephiroth, and when Sephiroth makes no attempt to stop him, changes the file himself. “You can see them go in, and you can hear a scream a few minutes later. Then the sounds are too low, though the motion sensors picked up some vibrations—but then there’s a second scream.”

“Ten minutes apart.” Sephiroth leans back in his chair as Valentine fast-forwards through the video. That is an extraordinarily long period for a fight, even with trained professionals. Granted, not all of that could be active combat, but even if the participants are hiding from or stalking each other—and then he jerks upright again.

He stares at the screen, his nerves still jangling. Then he starts to look at Valentine, only to glance sharply back at the computer when he realizes he hadn’t noted the time marker. He does now, and sees that it’s at the fifty-seventh minute.

“That wasn’t human,” he finally says. He reaches for the mouse, then pulls back his hand. He doesn’t need to replay that sound to remember it. “But—how can you rule out that that isn’t the attacker?”

“Because of Henderson.” Grimoire goes back to the folders and drags out a new file, then starts it in the player. But then he stops. He stares at the screen, debating something with himself, and then he shakes his head and pushes away from the terminal. “I listened to all of these, and I know what Henderson sounded like when…I was there years ago when the pipe blew and his wife died. No, it wasn’t human then either, how he sounded, but it was him…and I thought the same as you when I saw their bodies. I’m not a forensic pathologist but I do hunt, and I know what it looks like when someone goes down fighting.”

Then he’s silent, looking at a spot just over the top of the screen on the wall. He’s hardened enough, despite his sympathies with the downtrodden locals, that he wasn’t shellshocked into inaction. He was able to investigate and put together clues and then a plan for Midgar to send out representatives, and Sephiroth has to admit to being impressed by that. But at the same time, something in Valentine seems…the scar tissue he has, it seems fitting.

“I have tried to work back through their movements. For Henderson and the miner, it wasn’t difficult to go through the records or my own memories, but for the woman there are more gaps. Still, I think I found a nexus of sorts,” Valentine says, rousing himself. He looks at Sephiroth. “She was known to ramble through the older shafts when she was drinking, and sometimes she’d run across a bit of ore to point out to the miners. It’s how she paid for herself. She found one spot just before it all started, and it was good enough that Henderson went to look at it with her and one of his best assessors. Not so good that he was going to start anything before the gas pocket was taken care of, but he checked it out. And the assessor was the miner who died.”

“Three of them and this spot,” Sephiroth says. He pushes back from the terminal himself. “How far is it from here? Can we get to it before dawn?”

That seems to startle Valentine. “Yes, but—if you’re trying to avoid Heidegger—”

“Then going while he’s sleeping it off is your best choice—I’m your best choice,” Sephiroth says. He’s aware the aggression is coming out in his tone, but he’s also aware of how limited a window they have, and of how many potential complications they can avert if only he can solve this, if only he can gather all the cards before anyone else. He can do this, and he must do this. “Any hint of something unnatural and he’ll turn it over to R&D, he doesn’t want to be anywhere near that. It’s fortunate he hasn’t already with the number of mutant jokes he’s made, though that’s probably because I’m here and he’s hoping we’ll simply cancel each other out.”

Valentine exhales softly. He does seem a little taken aback, but not unreceptive to the argument, and after another moment he nods. But he’s slow to step out of Sephiroth’s way and then slow to go to the door.

“We can go, but it’s a difficult area to reach. I assigned guards to it as soon as I pinpointed it, but they’re well out of hailing distance,” Valentine says. He puts his hand on the door handle and opens it, but stops there as he looks at Sephiroth. “This is no slight on you, Commander, but if the point is to avoid R&D’s attention, what are we planning once we’re there?”

Sephiroth purses his lips. His initial reaction was to simply tell Valentine that as a noncombatant, the man needn’t come all the way with him and can stay with the guards, but he rethinks that. Valentine doesn’t show any signs of being afraid, and from everything that he’s said so far, physical safety for himself isn’t necessarily his top concern. But he’s reluctant about something, and that something hasn’t been entirely resolved by Sephiroth agreeing they both have interests in minimizing public attention.

“Are you concerned about someone besides R&D? Is it the ore deposit?” Sephiroth tries. “It would be better to tell me—I can hear you out, but I can’t guess at your mind. I can’t exceed my authority either, but I can tell you that I take my missions seriously, and my primary mission here is to keep this from disrupting our war preparations, no more than that.”

Oddly enough, this brings a brief smile to Valentine’s face. “I appreciate that, Commander,” he says. “I should point out that the loss of the probable general for this war would be considered a major disruption.”

Sephiroth blinks hard. Then barks out a laugh before he can catch himself: that would be considered a reasonable point, but he can’t help thinking how rarely he’s heard that in Midgar. “Dr. Valentine, this is my profession. That said, I am planning to join Heidegger’s meeting with the local Public Safety team in the morning. I will defend myself if necessary but my intent here is merely to investigate.”

Valentine nods. He thinks it over for a few seconds, then silently goes through the doorway and turns to wait on Sephiroth. Once they’re both in the hall, he explains that he’d like to call ahead to the guards and have them check the sensors while he and Sephiroth are en route. Whatever this thing is, it’s clearly not at the spot all the time. He also wants to make a stop to pick up his own weapons—he states that bluntly, without shying around it or acting as if he's fishing for Sephiroth’s tacit approval for the technical violation of civilian protocols.

They’re both fair points anyway, and Sephiroth readily agrees. He’s half-expecting to have to go back to Valentine’s office, but instead the other man takes them to yet another floor where he ducks into what Sephiroth belatedly realizes is his laboratory. Sephiroth stays outside, but Valentine leaves the door open so he can partly see the man, and he can clearly hear the two calls Valentine makes.

That’s deliberate, Sephiroth thinks, and as he idly checks the hang of his scabbard, he does wonder again at how much effort Valentine is putting into this, and where. It’s one thing to enlist Sephiroth as an ally in local efforts under Midgar’s radar, but Valentine is going beyond that, almost as if he wants Sephiroth’s personal opinion of him to be favorable. Even the Shinra directors who see Sephiroth as a better military asset than a scientific one don’t bother with—with wanting Sephiroth to like them.

The thought makes Sephiroth shy, and then he shakes his head and straightens himself. He’s drifting, he thinks, and then his PHS buzzes.

It’s very late, even for Hojo. And while Sephiroth wishes dearly that he knew of anyone else who would try him at this hour, for any reason…he tells himself he’s better off reviewing it all in the morning, where he can easily put it up and weigh it against other demands on him. He tells himself this, and then he takes his PHS out anyway.

Hojo hasn’t messaged him. The man has sent a very long email, detailing all the sacrifices he’s made in order to push Project Jenova through and support Sephiroth—Hojo’s word, which stirs a visceral hiss out of Sephiroth—till he could reach his full potential. A potential that Hojo hasn’t even fully disclosed to anyone because of his fear that others would misunderstand and so thwart his efforts, but if Sephiroth knew—

If Sephiroth knew. If that man who cannot even claim a professional title like a sponsor knew how much Sephiroth has had to fend for himself, has had to actively combat Hojo’s decades of misanthropy so he can be seen for himself and not as the man’s test animal…and for Hojo to say this was all in service of making Sephiroth perfect.

Valentine steps out in the middle of the savage snarl emitting from Sephiroth’s throat. He immediately stops, the hand he doesn’t have on the door moving out from his side with its palm first in an instinctive defensive position.

“It’s nothing. An unrelated matter,” Sephiroth snaps. He takes a breath with full intention of controlling himself, but instead only seems to shake loose yet another wave of anger. He knows this doesn’t further his goals, knows it only feeds into Hojo’s own twisted ideas, and damn him, but he will not be reduced to that. “It’s—speaking of R&D and family. You’re right, they have—they have no conception of what that means.”

He doesn’t mean to say that. He knows better than to reveal his own feelings so obviously—but he means what he says, he means the words even if he didn’t mean them to come out.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Valentine says, and when Sephiroth looks sharply at him, he tenses but he doesn’t wipe away the inciting sympathy in his eyes. “Back when I—but then it’s very different now, you’re right. It’s not like it was when I first worked with your mother.”

Sephiroth starts. Then he—he’s already looking at Valentine, he realizes even as his head moves. His rage vanishes, he nearly forgets that he’d been reading Hojo’s email, and all he can think is to say, “Jenova?”

Valentine blinks hard. Then again. Then he grimaces and ducks away, turning towards the elevator at the end of the hall. “I’ve overst—I apologize. I know what Shinra is like, what my own department is like, and I’m trying to—all I want is to take care of the people here, and stop the deaths.”

He walks away even as Sephiroth continues to stare at him. The scrape of his shoe against the floor finally spurs Sephiroth and he jerks forward, then rapidly catches up the other man. Who braces his shoulders and back, but who, when he looks back at Sephiroth, isn’t trying to hide his feelings behind a mask. Nor are they as Sephiroth would have expected: no anger, disgust, or anything provocative. Valentine only looks saddened.

Which makes it all the harder not to ponder on that moment when the man’s gaze had hardened. What Sephiroth had said had upset him.

“Just one more stop and then we can head to the garage,” Valentine says. “I do respect the ban on weapons in the office, so I keep my guns in a locker near my parking space.”

Sephiroth nods but doesn’t ask any more questions for now. He does keep watch on the other man, but Valentine seems to have regained his usual demeanor. It might be an act—this all might be some sort of act, regardless of Valentine’s disclaimers to the contrary, and because the man is so believable about them, Sephiroth probably should be more on his guard. He can’t afford not to be.

And he can think of alternative explanations. Yes, Hojo keeps what he knows under wraps and Sephiroth can personally attest to how difficult it is to circumvent the man’s precautions, but the Jenova Project wasn’t the work of him and him alone. Nor was he the only member of R&D at the very start of the Project.

But Hojo has been the head of R&D for most of Sephiroth’s life, and he’s used that leverage to sideline, silence, and drive out other personnel who might have known anything beyond the most general details. By the time Sephiroth was old enough to independently contact anyone, many had actually died—probably not murder in most cases, but side-effects of hazardous materials exposures. Even so, Sephiroth has no doubt that Hojo acted to ensure their knowledge died with them. So for Valentine to not only possess information about the Project but to have escaped Hojo’s knowledge…Sephiroth should wonder about that, as he was wondering about the man’s earlier unusual treatment of him. He should wonder, and should take appropriate precautions.

Valentine seems to expect as much, since though he talks little, his body language and positioning all express exceeding caution as he equips himself with two pistols from his locker. There are long guns as well and Sephiroth notes how the man’s hand brushes against them, but the pistols are the more sensible choice in a space-limited environment. And letting him see all of that is very deliberate on Valentine’s part, as is the man offering him first choice on seating when they go to the car afterward.

Sephiroth takes the front passenger seat, unhooking his sword from his belt so he can prop it between his legs. Valentine slides behind the wheel and then takes a moment to adjust his seatbelt over himself. “We’ll drive up to the foot of the mountain, but then we’ll have to borrow some chocobos from the corral. My car can’t manage the road there and getting another one would keep us from coming back in time for your meeting,” he says.

That sounds reasonable. And that is all Sephiroth means to say—yes, he has questions for Valentine, but unless he wants to pull out of this spot visit, now is not the time for them. He’ll only distract himself further, regardless of whatever Valentine’s true motivations are, and if those are unfriendly he’ll need his focus elsewhere. Valentine himself seems to prefer going back to the business at hand and that too seems the best course.

But what Sephiroth says is: “The Project that created me was named after her—after my birth mother. Since she didn’t survive the process.”

Valentine had been about to start the car, but at that his fingers slip on the ignition. He pulls his arm up, staring out the windshield, and for a moment Sephiroth thinks that he means to step back out of the car. But then he…he doesn’t compose himself, his expression is still far too unsettled, but he does make a decision, and that decision is to stay and listen.

“That always seemed…uncharacteristic of Hojo,” Sephiroth puts into the thick, cramped silence. He can’t quite reason why—he’s being extraordinarily irrational now, and yet it doesn’t feel like the other times his control escaped him, like the world was spinning rapidly away from his feet. If anything, he feels as if there’s no effort at all to speaking. “He’s far from sentimental, except about his own reputation. And I cannot find any records at all of a woman with that or any similar name.”

“It wasn’t her name. That wasn’t—Jenova wasn’t her name.” Valentine’s expression hardens again, like it did for that fleeting moment before. Then he swiftly turns the other way, but there’s enough light for Sephiroth to make out his reflection in the window and he is angry. Angry, but without force behind it, as if dulled by resignation. “Sephiroth, I should—”

“I’m going to look into these deaths and find their cause, and before I leave I’ll make certain it won’t strike again,” Sephiroth says. His voice rises but he’s able to catch that quickly enough to modulate into firmness rather than hysteria. “My parentage is completely irrelevant to that mission. But you knew of her, clearly, and I’ve been lied to—we both work with lies, Dr. Valentine, let’s not pretend otherwise. I can understand if you need to consider your own well-being, but you can still be honest about it. You can at least—at least tell me yes or no.”

Valentine’s eyes briefly close. Then open again as he faces forward. He moves a little, but then rejects whatever his intent had been and simply slumps back into his seat with a sigh.

“I never worked in Hojo’s area,” he eventually says. “We knew of each other, but we kept our distance—I wasn’t interested, and then I realized it was safer that way. I think he’s left me alone because of that, because I’m more than happy to simply putter around in obscurity when I’m not saving Shinra the cost of an extra engineer.”

To Sephiroth’s recollection, Hojo has mentioned Valentine at most a handful of times, always dismissively. Even when he had stormed down to rant at Sephiroth about this mission, the man hadn’t brought up Valentine. “I did look up your work,” he says. “It’s interesting, but hard to see any military applications.”

“Yes, by design,” Valentine says, with a very brief, sad smile. Then he inhales deeply, bracing himself. He turns to face Sephiroth. “I had an assistant, a woman named Lucrecia Crescent. She was rotating through groups before R&D decided where to permanently assign her, and while she was working with me, I had my accident.”

That had also been in the records, an incident involving a field exploration of an unstable cavern. Valentine had nearly died in it, and had been on medical leave for nearly a year afterward. Sephiroth’s memory flashes up that same name, Lucrecia Crescent, from the incident report. She’d only been lightly injured and had given a short witness statement about helping Valentine out of the cave.

“That shut down my work and she went to her next rotation early so it wouldn’t stall her career.” Valentine pauses, holding Sephiroth’s gaze. “In Hojo’s Nibelheim lab. She was supposed to be there for three months, but then extended that twice, and then died of illness roughly coinciding with your birth. Those are the facts I know—my recovery was slow, and aside from a few emails, I wasn’t able to speak with her after she left Corel.”

“But when you say—you’re saying—”

“She was the only woman in Hojo’s lab at that time. I know what he’s said in press releases, but if he recruited a volunteer from outside of R&D, it never—”

Sephiroth shakes his head before the man can finish. His vehemence is partly because he can’t yet absorb the enormity—the meaning of what Valentine is saying, and so he falls back on what is solid knowledge. “I know, I’ve tried that angle. He didn’t go outside. It would’ve been harder for him to scrub their trail if he did and I’ve found nothing. She had to have already been part of Shinra.”

Valentine looks almost on the verge of smiling at Sephiroth, at being relieved…and then he pulls back into his prior reserve. “I thought so. Only privately, because Lucrecia—she was very good, she had a promising career in front of her, but she was only here for a month and a half and I won’t claim more of a relationship with her than there was. I always thought it was her, and then the first time I saw one of the press releases about you—you look unmistakably like her.”

Sephiroth sucks his breath through his teeth. Then starts to reply, but Valentine has already flinched and twisted to look forward again.

“I never said anything about it, about her. She didn’t have a family, she came in through a Shinra scholarship and she was so dedicated—I never did, and I have to live with that.” He puts his hand to the ignition and this time turns it on without hesitation. Then he puts the car into gear and backs it out without undue speed but also without any attempt to check the concrete pillars crowded about the parking space. It’s a miracle that they don’t strike any. “I can’t claim what I never had, and I am not claiming to offer you any kind of—anything more than my words. I’m not going to burden you either. You can do what you want with what I’ve said, and you don’t owe me protection or anything else. I just ask that we do deal with what happened to Henderson and the other two first.”

Then Valentine stops talking again. But a thousand additional questions spin through Sephiroth’s stunned mind, a thousand—this isn’t the time suddenly cuts through the whirlwind. This is neither the time nor the place, and even if he asked all of his questions now, what would the answers do for him? His mother—

They are in a car, and out of the building on the road out of town now. He should ask about that. He should think about that, and about the crime scene they’re heading toward, and the man who is taking him to it. If he wants to ask all of his questions and then have a chance to act on that information, he should first think through that. And if he can’t, then he should have Valentine turn the car around and take him back to…back to what? To swallowing Heidegger’s insults and hiding from Hojo’s demands? He knows it’s an act and knows it’s only to buy him time till he can prove himself strongest, but all the same, he can’t stand it any longer.

He doesn’t know anything about himself that he hasn’t had to earn with his own wits and hands, except for his mother’s name, and now Valentine is telling him even that had been a lie. But then—but then Valentine is also telling him that Sephiroth’s mother had been real. She had been real, and just as suddenly the storm in Sephiroth’s mind blows over. All the lies, all the obfuscating agendas, all that detritus, it’s all gone, but the truth remains.

She had been an actual person, not merely a figure Hojo pulls out whenever he wants to disparage the human ‘weakness’ he sees in Sephiroth, and other people had known her. She had truly existed independently of Hojo, and so since he is her son, he too can…

The car stops. Sephiroth jerks in place, his hand going to his sword as something moves in the darkness ahead of them, and he gradually realizes just how long he’s been paralyzed in his own thoughts. They’re well into the countryside now, with no light besides that of the car headlights, which Valentine keeps on as he gets out.

Sephiroth’s ear catches the low call of a sleepy chocobo. He exhales, rolls his shoulders, and then looks out of the car windows. The headlights shine onto a chain-link fence a few yards away, with slowly-stirring chocobos scuffing about the edges of the dim yellow pools. One comes closer as Sephiroth exits the car, bobbing its head warily before turning towards Valentine’s tongue-clicking. It seems to recognize the man and walks up to just shy of the fence.

Electrified, Sephiroth thinks as he hears a low hum. Valentine goes over to a control panel and punches in a code, then walks to the left to a gate so he can unlock it. “I forgot to ask,” he says as Sephiroth comes up. “Have you ridden without a saddle before? I didn’t bring tack with me, and I’d have to call down one of the guards to unlock the shed here for us.”

“Yes,” Sephiroth says.

Valentine hesitates, then nods. “It’s not a long ride and they’re well-trained. I haven’t had any messages so I think we’re still clear, but I don’t know how long that will last.”

“Then let’s not waste the time. We can always finish our discussion afterward,” Sephiroth says.

It feels false somehow, as if he’s following someone else’s line rather than what his own common sense is telling him is the best course of action. And he feels stiff when he goes into the pen, as if he’s nervous and inexperienced when he’s long since outstripped anything that the stablehands back in Midgar can teach.

He tries to shake it off. He knows what he needs to do. He trails one chocobo, then another when it seems more responsive, and in a couple minutes he has it nosing at his shoulder as he checks over its neck and back. He keeps an eye on Valentine, but the other man only does exactly the same, with about the number of cautious glances one would expect and no suspicious movements.

When they’re both mounted, Valentine leads them out of the corral. He hops off his chocobo to shut the gate again, then remounts to direct them up a barely visible, very narrow trail through the brush. Again, he’s in front, and he’d have to be both a superb shot and an acrobat in order to draw one of his guns and shoot without Sephiroth being able to stop him.

He doesn’t try. They go about ten minutes, then dismount when the outline of a guardhouse emerges against the night sky. When Valentine hails it, an outside light clicks on and then swiftly goes off. Then the rectangle of an opening door spills fresh light out into the darkness, with the silhouette of a person just inside.

Valentine and Sephiroth walk up and the guard inside greets Valentine before giving Sephiroth the usual double-take, eyes widening with the second look and body language stiffening. Though they’re civil enough to not let any comments slip, and simply answer Valentine’s questions about sensor readings and other potential signs of activity in the shaft that lies just beyond the guardhouse.

Sephiroth listens but lets Valentine handle the discussion. He adjusts his sword—rehooked back to his belt—and angles himself so that he can look at the shaft through the guardhouse doorway. He should have asked Valentine for a map of the tunnel, he thinks. Or at least a verbal description if all the maps are so dated. It’s dark enough already that even his eyesight is straining, and it’ll be darker inside. He’s been too distracted; he shakes his head, then tells himself to stop making that mistake.

“It’ll take a second to power up the lights, since it’s off a generator and not the grid here,” Valentine says, coming up to him. Then the man pauses. “I’m reasonably certain that nothing is in the tunnel right now, and if you only want to see the scene—”

“Agreed, the more lighting the better. I do want to understand what they were looking at and why that might have…altered them,” Sephiroth says. “This isn’t the monster hunt.”

Valentine inclines his head. He looks back where the guard is speaking into a radio, but then chooses to continue talking to Sephiroth instead. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“This isn’t the time to speak about it,” Sephiroth mutters. He adjusts his sword again, pointlessly, before jerking his hand off it. “But I do want to speak about—that. Later. I—her name—I was always told and I don’t know why—”

Not the time, Sephiroth repeats to himself. He shakes his head, then sees a string of lights begin to go on, starting outside of the shaft and then trailing into it. He takes a step out of the guardhouse, but then Valentine grabs his elbow.

“You said you’d tried to look for her,” Valentine says. He lets go of Sephiroth almost before Sephiroth has to pull against his grip, but steps down as if he still has hold and is being dragged along. That puts his face into shadow but doesn’t hide how rough his voice has suddenly become. “You looked, but under Jenova?”

“Yes, I’ve been trying to find information about her for years. Hojo wouldn’t even tell me if she’d died or not, he’d imply that but then claim she left me for being weak whenever his mood changed.” Then Sephiroth shakes himself again. He resists the urge to glance behind them; he knows the guard is still inside the guardhouse and they’re speaking softly enough that they shouldn’t be overheard, but they still need to stop this conversation. “Later, I want to—”

Valentine exhales. “I didn’t think he’d change her name,” he says. “You…you mentioned in one of your interviews that you wanted to make your mother proud, so I thought…but you didn’t know her name.”

It seems more a comment to himself than to Sephiroth, since now his head is hanging low to his chest and his voice is drifting again. When Sephiroth takes another step, Valentine stirs, but only to put his hand up to his temple and press it there.

“Let’s get this over with,” Sephiroth says.

Valentine continues to rub at his head, and at first Sephiroth thinks the man didn’t hear. But as he’s repeating himself, Valentine abruptly starts forward. The man doesn’t look at Sephiroth but strides past so that Sephiroth has no choice but to go forward as well, and together they head into the tunnel.

It runs straight into the mountainside for about twenty yards, then starts slope downward. Side-tunnels also appear, but Valentine continues walking down the large central one. The lighting is clearly temporary, no more than bulbs on a wire periodically tacked to the stone, but it’s good enough for Sephiroth to make out the details of the central tunnel without any issues. The side-tunnels are a different matter, but so far they’ve all had boards nailed over their entrances. Sephiroth is mindful of Valentine’s earlier words that they’re probably not filled-in beyond those boards, but he doesn’t hear anything concerning behind the wood.

He also doesn’t see anything particularly notable, or feel it. His enhanced senses include an ability to detect Mako radiation and certain other environmental hazards well before a normal person could, but nothing is coming through. If anything, he can see why the miners abandoned this one as played out.

“How much further?” Sephiroth asks, and then frowns when Valentine starts sharply. He looks closely at the other man, then puts his hand to his sword. “Is this the place?”

Valentine had shifted away from Sephiroth. The actual movement had been slight, but compared to his behavior so far it’s a striking deviation. And his expression too—he’s distracted again, but unlike before, it’s not because his thoughts have wandered down an entirely unrelated path. From the way he stiffens, he was clearly already considering something about Sephiroth, something he would rather have hidden.

“It is.” Even before he’s done speaking, Valentine is shaking his head. His hand goes towards his hip holster but then twists away as he turns on his heel and faces the entrance. “It is, but—I think we should—I shut this down before we fully investigated it. We don’t know—”

“Don’t you? You know much more than you reported, you’ve already confessed to that,” Sephiroth says as he takes a half-step to the side, opening up the space between them better for an…no, Valentine still isn’t the target. If only because Sephiroth wants so desperately to know—he pivots around and stares at a nearby offshoot tunnel. “You have motion sensors in place when this clearly has been abandoned for some time. It wouldn’t have been too much to put in more sensors if you were trying to find out…”

“We don’t have that many resources, and we’d already lost three people,” Valentine says, more harshly than Sephiroth has heard from him so far. “Commander, please. We both share a goal here, and I don’t want—I don’t see the value in putting you at risk of—”

“Risk of what? Turning into a monster? Some would say that passed at my birth,” Sephiroth mutters, walking closer to the offshoot.

He half-hears Valentine move towards him, but then the man stops and says something quietly under his breath. It’s louder than the—the whisper Sephiroth is trying to track and he irritably waves his hand at the other man to silence him, moving closer to the tunnel. This one isn’t boarded up the same way as the others, he now notices: the boards are newer, and the way they’re nailed together looks suspicious.

“Commander—” Valentine says sharply. “Commander—what are you do—”

By then Sephiroth has spotted the hinges. He closes the gap and seizes the top, then pulls on it till he can gauge where the bracing bar behind the door is. Valentine takes a hasty step towards him but swiftly backpedals when Sephiroth draws his sword and slashes through the wood right at the joints. The door crashes to one side, swinging on a mangled hinge with a painful screech that makes any further speech impossible.

Or it should, but Sephiroth can hear her quite clearly now. She’s calling him her son and telling him how cold and dark it’s been, waiting for him, how lonely it’s been. He wrenches at the boards with his bare hands, ignoring when the splinters drive through his gloves and draw blood. He can hear her, he can see—he thinks he can see where she is, can see and feel how she’s trapped.

There’s a noise behind him again. Interference she calls it and her fear and anger flow over him. Part of the door breaks off in his hand and he flings it over his shoulder, then drops his sword and scrambles into the gap he’s made before they can stop him. His boot-heel comes down on a loose piece of wood or rock and he stumbles, falling against the wall. Chilly damp smears over his side, somehow making itself felt through his clothing as he forces himself forward. He’s coming for her. He’s coming for her and when they reunite he’ll welcome her, him with his strong young whole body and—

—and—

Sephiroth stumbles again, but not because something has caused him to lose his footing. It’s something—he feels her suspicion bite into his mind, and then her fear crests again, an almost overwhelming wave that—she can’t let him out, she can’t—she wants to drown him. She wants him, she does want him but she wants not him but his body and—

Like him Sephiroth thinks. It’s near-impossible, the way that that thought survives the alien onslaught in his mind, survives it and then pushes back, keeps its own shape against assault on all sides. But he thinks it—he holds onto it. He finds his shape by the way of its shape and yes, he remembers to hate it, hate the fact that it is Hojo who first taught him how his mind didn’t matter, Hojo who was his first opponent, Hojo who has always seen him first for what he can be made to be and not who he was but nevertheless it is this that saves him from her.

Sephiroth slams into stone, then drops heavily to one knee. Blood is dripping down his chin, and when he paws at it, he’s so dazed that his hand is a good inch off. He drags himself closer to the wall for its support and tries again, feeling at his head and feeling shocked when it appears to be in one piece—it should be in shattered shards all around his feet, with how she’s lashed at him. And then he hears her again.

He—he needs to get out. His—he gropes at his belt but his sword isn’t there. He can’t remember—he does remember the other tunnel had light in it, not like this one where he can’t see a damned thing. He twists against the rock, squinting frantically around till he finally spots a streak of light in the distance. How he’d come so far, he doesn’t know, but she’s further in the darkness and coming up and before she does he has to make it to the light.

“Sephiroth?” comes a strange, distorted voice. Not like her at all, he thinks—not like her, like a human, and for a moment his feelings of relief are confusingly doubled with her feelings of revulsion. “Commander! Can you—is it you?”

“Val—doctor—” Sephiroth croaks as he crawls towards the voice. Yes, crawls, his nails chipping and then breaking as he hauls himself against the increasingly vicious pull of her will “Make her—make her—shut up—”

Valentine swears. So crude, not like him, so crude and human and Sephiroth feels his mind briefly shred, as her thoughts stab repeatedly into it and try to kill all of his own thoughts. He has to stop where he is—he digs his fingers in so he won’t fall further but he can’t make any more headway.

He’s vomiting now. He hadn’t eaten that much for dinner and rapidly runs out of food, with near-pure stomach acid burning over his fingers as he tries to wipe it off his mouth. She’s still battering at him and she’s going to burn him to ashes if this keeps up.

Then she’ll have ashes, he thinks with the last of his willpower. Ashes only and not her damned body, not her mere tool, she can be satisfied with that much because he won’t give up himself even to his—his—

My son she cries, furious, and he lets out his own snarl. “You’re—not—my—my m—”

“Sephiroth,” Valentine grunts, so shockingly close that Sephiroth looks up.

But it’s not the other man in front of him. It’s some huge dark form, crouched over him, just enough light gleaming past it from some haphazardly-moving source to outline horns, heavily-muscled shoulders, fur. Claws as long as a man’s finger coming down towards Sephiroth—he jerks himself up the wall and throws an arm across himself, but the thing bites into that.

The pain is otherworldly. He feels it, he feels nothing but it, and—not her. He doesn’t feel her anymore, he realizes, just as the thing releases his arm. He can’t hold it up so the limb drops uselessly against his chest, bleeding badly. He jerks again, watching helplessly as the thing—it’s hunching repeatedly, no, spasming, but it’s too dark to make out what is happening until suddenly a bright light flashes across both of them and the lines of a man’s face burn into Sephiroth’s eyes.

Young, pale, black hair. Handsome face but feral red eyes and long white canines and somehow Sephiroth manages to think the man looks appalled just before he lunges forward and buries those canines in Sephiroth’s throat.

Chapter 3: Present

Midgar, Ten Years Later

“Nobody wants to go to Corel, puppy,” Angeal says, shaking his head.

But then, he always does that when someone calls in SOLDIER and doesn’t have a full briefing together. Zack can understand why, it’s not as if SOLDIER has endless numbers of people to send out even if every single one they do have is a bonafide supersoldier, and as a responsible general, Angeal has to make sure they’re not putting their people at unnecessary risk. So that’s Angeal’s job, while it’s his job to look at these kinds of requests and think about how people need them to help and how they can do that.

“Come on, man, what’s not to like about this?” he says as he hooks over a chair with his foot. When it slides under his hand, he gives it another push to his left for Cloud, then grabs the next one and flops down into it. “Short supply line, locals with their own infrastructure, actual invite to the dance?”

Cloud side-steps the chair, then winces as the tray of coffees in his hand rocks. He doesn’t spill any but looks silently grateful when Zack turns back to take them from him. Grateful, and then he goes back out into the hall and helpfully waves till Cissnei sees where they are and comes in with him.

“Urban landscape. Urban, underground landscape,” Angeal says. He flicks a glance over at Cissnei but doesn’t stop, which is unusual for him. “People who don’t like us, to the point they waited for three people to turn up dead before they asked.”

“Well, they get the news like anybody else, I’m sure they know we just had to send a battalion back to the border,” Zack says. He offers Cissnei a coffee, which she declines with a small shake of the head, then plucks out the biggest one and slides it across the table to Angeal. “They did still ask.”

“Miners don’t like anyone. It’s not really personal,” Cloud says. Of course, then he looks mildly terrified about having had the balls to say anything at all, despite his shiny new promotion to Zack’s assistant, and quickly ducks not to the seat Zack had gotten him, but the chair at the very back of the room.

Angeal snorts and gives Cloud a smile, but it’s half-hearted. He’s mostly paying attention to Cissnei now. “Anyway, if we’re trying to figure out what to do about it, I’m going to need a few more details than autopsy reports. There a reason why we can’t get any security footage, activity logs? Didn’t Scarlet relocate her trials up to Rocket Town?”

“I can’t represent Weapons Dev, sir,” Cissnei says.

She’s pretty wooden about it, and for all that Zack is determined not to let one meeting kill the good vibe for the day, he has to take a quick look between her and Angeal, who’s eyeballing her like she should have something better. Like she’d promised him something better, and Zack has gotten to know Cissnei well enough now—and of course can read Angeal like the back of his favorite soda can—to know she doesn’t promise what she can’t deliver to someone like Angeal.

“Yeah, but Tseng said there was something on your side. Otherwise we won’t be having this meeting, and I wouldn’t be piling half of Wutai on Gen,” Angeal says pointedly.

Out of the corner of his eye, Zack sees Cloud twitch. When he takes a full look over, the other man’s got his eyes buried in the floor and a stoneface as good as any grizzled veteran can do, but Cloud only just got an exec-level security clearance with his promotion and hasn’t sat through many of these meetings yet. Zack clears his throat, making sure the poor kid will get the time for that, and then picks up the cable adapter for the big screen on the wall.

“So this meeting is officially on,” he says. “Agenda item one: what are we doing?”

Cissnei cracks a smile as she takes out her tablet, but then she just lays that screen-side down on the table. She waits till Zack has put down the adapter. “We do have some additional reports including footage, but they’re…unclear and unverified. I’m going to share them with you anyway, but we wanted to get that out first so you have the right expectations.”

Angeal snorts again. “Yeah, well, appreciate it, but let’s not jump to the post-mortem before anyone dies. First I’ve got to determine if this even falls under SOLDIER.”

Cissnei frowns, and if Zack wasn’t trying so hard, he’d be too. Angeal is being really cranky today and he isn’t sure why, considering he manages the man’s inbox and calendar and should know what else is on Angeal’s mind. The Wutai border is flaring up again, and bad enough that Genesis will have to go if Angeal isn’t free and that’s its own set of headaches, but those plans aren’t set yet. Also, Zack did take a look at the autopsy reports from Corel and they looked pretty bad.

“Corel is critical infrastructure, and they found one of the victims near Number Sixty,” Cissnei says. “That’s the highest-yielding—”

“Yeah, I know, I don’t need you repeating what Scarlet was hissing at me about already,” Angeal snaps. Then even he seems to realize where this is going and he sighs. “Okay, I know it’s not you, but don’t beat around the bush. Just…lay it out. What’s the part that makes this not local Public Security and SOLDIER? Who are we not trying to embarrass this time?”

Zack glances at Cloud at the mention of ‘Scarlet’ and the other man nods and pulls out his phone. Whenever that had been, it had definitely not been scheduled, and definitely shouldn’t have slipped past either of them, so now Zack can get why Angeal is a little touchy. But Cloud is good at that sort of thing—it’s the face, it can get into anywhere and make anyone confess if he just looks pathetic enough—so Zack leaves that in his hands and focuses on Cissnei.

Who’s decided to just be professional about this, folding her hands over her tablet. “That’s one of the points we’re unclear on. Let me start with this: the autopsy reports weren’t altered. You can rely on those.”

Angeal raises his brows, but his body posture is subtly looser. He’s actually listening and not chewing over something. “And we can’t rely on…”

“I wouldn’t say you can’t rely on it, but like I said, the source isn’t one-hundred-percent clear.” Cissnei pauses for a second. Then she picks up her tablet and turns it over, the corners of her mouth tightening a little. “The victims all had in common that they’d recently been in Midgar for medical services. They saw different doctors here and had different treatments, but since they were male and in the appropriate age range, they were put through the standard SOLDIER screens.”

Zack sits up, looking closely at Angeal. The other man grimaces but doesn’t say anything, or do anything besides nod at Cissnei. He’d argued long and hard against that policy, and still occasionally dropped a comment about wishing they could recruit some other way.

“Nothing came up on those,” Cissnei goes on. She’s obviously prepared for objections from Angeal any second now, but doesn’t seem scared of him. Just being a Turk, Zack guesses. “They were on the low end of acceptable, so they were marked down but not sent to a recruiter.”

“Were they told about their results at all?” Angeal asks.

“No. The information’s available if requested but it doesn’t look like any of them asked for it,” Cissnei says, and then waits for Angeal to finish his huff; they all know that requesting your results is too much of a pain for most people to bother, if they even know they have that option. “They all went home, and then it appears went back to their lives, except that recently, there’s been a—sort of a fad for séance parties in the abandoned parts of the mines.”

Angeal rolls his eyes. “Glad I’m taking this one instead of Gen,” he says with a side-look at Zack. “Séances? You serious?”

“Corel-recruited units have had casu—”

“Yeah, I know. I relieved that position,” Angeal snaps. Then he stops. He puts his hands on the table, breathes in, and then looks at Cisssnei. “Sorry, keep going. So people are trying to contact their dead loved ones in the mines.”

“Not…quite.” And this is where Cissnei looks genuinely, even if it’s just for a moment, at a loss about how to explain things. She pokes blindly at her tablet before looking back up at Angeal. “There’s a lot of rumors, our local contacts have had a lot of work trying to filter them. But it seems like there’s this one specific ghost making the rounds, and they say it’s a dead SOLDIER. It’s been predicting who is going to get sent off next to Wutai, apparently.”

“Well, that’s not going to go over well with the locals,” Angeal mutters. He looks pained and irritated, but not nearly as weirded out as Cissnei. Then he seems to pick up on Zack’s thoughts and looks over, first to Zack and then to Cloud. “This happens. Not always ghosts, but somebody says they have inside knowledge of who SOLDIER’s gonna—” Angeal’s lips twist “—who we’re gonna grab next, force into battle. Wherever people are feeling frustrated about the war, this just comes up.”

Cissnei nods along, but Zack can’t help noticing she seems a lot uneasier about it for something that regularly happens, and that’s on top of her being a Turk. He likes her better than her colleagues, but she’s proud of that and he knows what that means.

“It seems that the three victims somehow were convinced their visits to Midgar put them at greater risk, so they decided to consult this ghostly oracle,” Cissnei says. She moves her finger over her tablet and since she’s still looking at them, Zack assumes that she’s just fidgeting. “It’s known they went together as a group to one old shaft that’s a big one for this ghost. They all walked out of there without any visible injuries, and apparently said nothing really happened but over the next few days they…had behavioral changes. And we have both them saying it and other people saying it about them.”

Angeal moves his hand like he’s going to ask a question and Cissnei stops, but he just stares at her, as if he’s not quite sure what she’s saying. Or…as if he does know what she’s saying, but he’s not sure why she’s saying it, except that he doesn’t like that she’s saying it.

That’s the kind of look Zack is more used to Angeal giving to Palmer or Hollander, not to someone like Cissnei who may not always be working to the same agenda as them but who isn’t power-tripping on it. “Like violent changes? Or just they’re taking milk in their coffee when they weren’t before?”

Both Angeal and Cissnei twitch, Angeal in the shoulders and Cissnei with her fingers skittering across her tablet before she catches herself. Then they give Zack annoyed glances, which cuts the rising tension in the air by a good half. “The Turks wouldn’t be looking into it if it was just coffee, Fair,” Cissnei says dryly.

“So why weren’t they sent in for a med check, or have a psych watch put on them?” Angeal asks. He still looks like this is not his favorite conversation ever, but the worrying part of that isn’t there any more and he’s back to just being General Hewley, king of taking it on the chin and then getting it done anyway. “There’s what, fifty different ways you can get psychosis just off raw Mako alone and Corel’s got plenty of—”

“It’s a dry shaft, General. A specialist team should still verify but I think if Corel’s saying that that one spot has nothing left to dig up, we can trust them on that much.” Cissnei glances down at her tablet. Her lips thin and then her expression briefly goes the kind of stiff you make before doing a cold plunge before she unlocks the screen. “Violent. Aggressive. A psych hold was in the works for two of them, but this was only over a three-day period. It takes a while to spin up things, and anyway, they all died at home, alone, without anyone else’s apparent physical involvement.”

Zack sighs. “Okay, yeah, listen, we know mental paperwork—”

Angeal’s hand goes up and he stops. The other man looks hard at Cissnei. “Apparent physical. Why are you saying—why qualify that?”

“This is the part where I just think I should show you,” Cissnei mutters, though from her tone and the way she’s dropped her eyes but averted them from the tablet, she doesn’t even like that much.

Then she’s playing a video for them. It’s of the outside of a concrete-block building, the second or third floor judging by the bit of streetlight pole to one side of the frame; the camera’s probably across the street and not pointed straight at the building. Night view, most of the windows dark except for one which seems to have a car headlight glare moving across the glass. But then Cissnei taps and an enhanced, blown-up frame overlays part of the video.

The whitish blob gains some features, enough to be recognizable as human but otherwise hard to say more than that. “Third floor, no access except through the front door and keycard and internal security cams say nobody went up with that victim. Timestamp says this was two hours after the victim died. There are—optical anomalies in the other two victims’ homes too. None of them come up the same way but analysis does come up with recurring traits consistent with it being the same…individual. These don’t seem to be faked either.”

“Ghosts, okay, if I had to go to work every day mile-down in the ground I’d probably take that kind of thing seriously too,” Zack says. “But I don’t see the part where this says SOLDIER on it.”

Cissnei doesn’t even look up at him. She just taps the screen again and another enhanced blow-up appears. This one looks like it’s of the same window as before but zeroing in on the other end of it—like the ghost or whatever it is had walked across the frame. Also, it’s turned so the outline of not just a head but also a shoulder and some kind of trailing scarf or headdress is visible.

“The ghost’s got a name, according to the locals,” she says. “Sephiroth.”

Which doesn’t ring any bells for Zack and while he’s a couple classes behind the very first SOLDIERs, he does think he’s got most of them down by name recognition at this point, if not by face. Besides, that’s the kind of name that he’d remember, and he starts to say that, only to jerk around as Cloud curses.

Cloud doesn’t curse. Zack has personally seen the kid take a third-degree burn on the ankle from a motorcycle exhaust pipe and barely voice a pained grunt because he was worried about embarrassing himself, so the first thing Zack thinks is that somebody’s burst in on them. But when he twists around, kicking his chair out and readying to lunge for the door…one, nobody’s come in, and two, Cloud is staring at the other end of the table.

At Angeal, who when Zack turns, is just getting up from his seat, an expression of mixed chagrin and irritation on his face as he looks down at the tablet. Then at the coffee now soaking into his front, and finally at the white-going-brown wad on the table between the edge and the tablet, which Zack slowly realizes is the remains of Angeal’s coffee.

He must exclaim or something like that because Angeal glances at him, and the look the man gives Zack is—it’s not like anything Zack’s ever seen. He’s gotten Angeal mad at him before, but this is…it’s embarrassed at first, and not like the regular kind but the kind where it slides so close to fear that restraint training protocols start to come to mind. But then it changes over fast to—to something Zack wants to call rage, except that that can’t be right. That’s not Angeal at all.

And it’s not the man who grimaces and then half-pivots to gesture Cloud, who’s edging forward with a handful of napkins, to back off. “No, don’t. Just—you got more, Cissnei, or was that the punchline?”

“That was the main point.” Cissnei is up on her feet too, but if she went for her gun at any point, Zack missed it because she just has both hands clasped in front of her. She does have her Turk Face on, and it’s pretty clear that she’ll be keeping it on for the rest of this meeting. “I have analysis from all the incidents showing the correlations. None of them are that clear—the footage from closer cameras is all normal—but we’ve gotten enough that we believe—”

“Same m—ghost, yeah, I get that.” Angeal cuts himself off, then exhales. He raises one hand towards his stained shirt—the coffee wasn’t boiling but it would’ve still been pretty hot—but then pushes it down to wipe at his trousers instead. Those have coffee soaking in too, but he doesn’t seem to be doing it to do something about that. “Fine. I think this briefing’s—this briefing’s over. We’ll—Tseng’ll hear from me. Thanks.”

That’s short. And not doing a thing about the literal freak-out he’d just had in front of all of them, but Cissnei doesn’t give anything away as she nods, picks up her tablet and then spins around to walk out of the room.

Angeal glances over his shoulder as she passes him, but then just keeps staring at the spot where the tablet had been on the tablet. Then he jerks a little. “Not now, Zack,” he snaps.

Zack hadn’t said anything. He’d just turned to go make sure the door closed all the way behind Cissnei, but when Angeal speaks, he stops. The other man finally looks over, then grimaces while drawing himself up.

“Cloud, sorry about that. Can you get a janitor?” Angeal asks.

The other man nods and starts to move towards the door, giving Zack a quick glance on the way. Zack nods his okay and then leans forward to take the napkins Cloud passes him. “Go grab Ang’s spare from his office closet—”

“No, I’ll get that. Just—what did we have next?” Angeal says. He digs out his phone and thumbs off the screen lock, his other hand still scratching at his hip. “Was it that—”

“It’s just roster requests, we can reschedule it,” Zack says.

Angeal shakes his head. “No, that’s just going to piss everybody else—look, Cloud, go there after you get the janitor and then just buy some time. Zack and me’ll be along, I just need five minutes.”

Cloud nods and heads out. Angeal does watch him go, then walks to the door and checks it. “He’s from Nibelheim,” Angeal says.

Zack looks up from picking up the crushed cup with a napkin. “Yeah, but he’s solid, Ang—”

Who looks ashamed of himself again, and who fiddles with his phone for a second before he says more. “I don’t mean it like that, Zack. Just…you know they stuck the head of R&D before Hollander up there for a year before he died.”

“Yeah. Yeah, Hojo, right,” Zack says. He drops a couple more napkins over the pool of coffee on the table, then eases his way up to Angeal. “Did he have something to do with this Sephiroth? Were they one of the misfires?”

Weirdly enough, Angeal looks unsure, and even if Zack has never seen Angeal act quite like this before, he does know the man well enough to know when Angeal’s unsure, Angeal stops dead and tries to figure things out before he goes ahead. It’s only when Angeal thinks he’s got a fix on something that he’ll do something about it, even if it’s one of the man’s rare losses of control.

“I think that’s where we’re gonna have to look into it,” Angeal finally says, after a long couple minutes of silence. “Did you see if Cloud recognized the name when Cissnei said?”

“Sephiroth?” Zack says, and then shakes his head. “Sorry, I wasn’t looking—”

But Angeal doesn’t appear to hold that against him and just sighs. “Me neither. I…listen, Sephiroth was the name of one of Hojo’s proto-SOLDIERs, I know that much. But he died on a mission to Corel and that’s what got Hojo demoted and exiled to Nibelheim. Hollander’s brought it up.”

From the way Angeal says that, Hollander has done it more than once, and tagged it onto one of his many, many manipulative lines about how Angeal and Genesis and basically all of SOLDIER owe him everything. “Well, okay, same place, same Shinra R&D, I can see it. But—”

“He showed Gen and me a couple clips and photos. Called the guy a deformed mutant, said he had a lot of things wrong with him so it wasn’t a surprise when the President called Hollander up and said your project’s getting the main stage instead.” Angeal’s tone is clipped, but this is honestly a lot more like him, whenever he has to talk about Hollander. “He didn’t look like one—Sephiroth, I mean. He did look different, but he looked human.”

“Right. So we can follow up on the R&D angle and trust me, I’m not gonna go through the big H,” Zack says. To be honest, he still can’t look at Angeal quite the same way, but since the other man seems to be back in problem-solving mode, Zack…would rather be there with him too. “If you don’t want me to have Cloud help out, that’s fine, he’ll get this is kind of more sensitive than I’ve been—”

Angeal blinks hard. “No, you should. He’s from Nibelheim, he—they went through the place after Hojo died but he and the others up there, maybe they heard something Hojo said,” he says. “There’s not going to be that much in the files, just barebones whatever Hollander kept that makes him look good over Hojo.”

“Makes sense,” Zack says, and it does. But it’s still weird, how Angeal is acting. He’s going to get on it because usually, that’s the only way that things start to get better, but he can’t not think about how weird this is already. “Okay.”

From the way Angeal grunts, Zack thinks that might be it for now. He wiggles the leftover napkins in Angeal’s peripheral vision and after a moment, Angeal takes them. Kind of half-hearted about dabbing them at his clothes, but he nods a thanks and then moves out of the way as footsteps head down the hall towards them.

That’s probably the janitor. Zack goes up to the door, but before he can reach the handle, Angeal speaks: “Everybody got told not to listen to Hojo after that mission, that he’d just fucked up the science so much and this Sephiroth just…fell apart. But Hojo used the same starting point as Hollander, even if he had—he did things differently. I know that, but not everyone does. So I think…I think we have to watch out there. They could start saying that about us.”

“Right,” Zack says. And that makes sense, it really does. People don’t know what goes into a SOLDIER and what they don’t know can be scary, especially if they don’t get a good first impression about it. Whatever happened with this Sephiroth, it probably started some stories in Corel that never really went away and something has revived them.

It even kind of helps with Angeal’s comment about Cloud, since for the longest time SOLDIER didn’t want to take anyone from the Nibelheim area because of Hojo, and frankly, nobody in Nibelheim was that interested in getting recruited even though plenty work for local Shinra facilities in other roles. Hojo’s still sort of a boogeyman for kids up there according to what Zack can worm out of Cloud, and even with Cloud as their hometown hero, they have to be seeing massacres before they’ll ask for a SOLDIER team to come help with anything.

But there’s still something weird about this, and Zack’s not going to let that go, not with his friend and general like this. He’s going to look into it.

* * *

First stop is Cloud, who tells Zack it wasn’t that big a deal and why would he be mad at General Hewley? With that amazing poker face of his, which honestly did more than anything else to earn him a place with SOLDIER; during recruitment he tested consistently low on everything but that one recruiter noticed he kept coming to the next day of testing, and usually when you’re that bad, your own shame keeps you home.

Zack owes that recruiter an infinity of drinks, because Cloud has already spent a couple hours running database searches on top of his daily duties, and even has taken a delivery from the Turks while he was at it. “Scan isn’t done on that yet,” he says as Zack takes a seat at the terminal next to him. “Rude said it might do that. Lots of big media files.”

“What, you two sharing words again?” Zack says.

Cloud knows it’s out of love and just shrugs. He keeps tapping away at his terminal but half-turns to watch Zack log in. “There’s not a lot.”

Zack nods, but waits till he’s up and running and has skimmed through his inbox before he comments. After he and Angeal had taken that next meeting, he’d had to go off and do a few other things, and then they’d gotten word that Genesis was headed in for an overnight, which always does maximum damage to Angeal’s calendar. By then Zack had mournfully said farewell to the canteen stirfry special for dinner and had just told Cloud he’d cram a power bar on the way up, but he’s got to get at least some of this started before he turns in for the night. Corel is still high priority and Angeal’s set to leave tomorrow afternoon.

Thankfully it doesn’t seem like too much else happened during the day—that, or they’re all hiding it from him in hopes that it won’t leak and dribble too much on the floor before Angeal is on his way to Corel. Zack’s able to get through everything else in five minutes and then he can turn to the zip file Cloud sent, along with the amazing steaming paper bag of wonder Cloud left by his terminal.

“I fucking love these noodles. I swear, they’re at least fifty percent sodium and fifty percent fat and the rest is probably extracted from the underside of a city tram, but once I start I can’t leave anyone behind,” Zack says through a mouthful of them. He throws Cloud the thank-you nod the man deserves, then twists back around as the pages auto-scroll for him.

They’re the standard SOLDIER recruit paperwork, so it’s not more than basic statistics. There’s a lot of blank spaces, but since this dates to before they’d fully digitized everything—hence the big files, it’s all just scanned images—Zack takes a closer look to make sure it’s not the quality of the scan. As it turns out, it isn’t, which means the data was just never entered but that’s not necessarily a red flag with someone who was a first-generation R&D project. Genesis and Angeal both have similar files and one of Zack’s first jobs was to just make up a profile PR could reference so they’d stop getting the same info requests over and over. Though Zack does pause at this Sephiroth’s weight training stats. “Huh. Could head-to-head with Angeal.”

Cloud went back to typing for a bit, but looks over now. He sees where Zack is at and pushes his chair closer. “Skip down two pages. That’s his sword skills.”

Zack goes there and lets the numbers absorb for a little bit. Or tries to, but even with Angeal as his literal sword instructor, he’s having a hard time. He flicks at the screen and sends the file rolling back up, then stabs in a fingertip to make it stop—it just happens to land on the physical and right in his face is how old the man allegedly was for this. “Okay, got a teenage wonder here…wait, but then why doesn’t he just head every competition table we have? I swear, I honestly never heard of him before and you know how close I am to those tables, Cloud.”

“Yeah,” Cloud says, firmly exasperated with Zack’s inner obsessive-fan nature as always. But that fades off as Cloud pokes Zack’s arm, and then shows Zack on his screen when Zack looks. “Because this profile isn’t feeding into any of the SOLDIER trackers. I started that way and wasn’t finding anything, and it wasn’t till I went out and did a keyword search in the general HR database that I found something. And that just tagged it for Rude to pull what he brought.”

“He’s not tagged as SOLDIER? But this is our format,” Zack says with a frown. He goes back to his screen and page-hops a couple times before his brain catches up with him, and then he goes to look at the metadata Cloud has that actually says something about this. Cloud’s right, of course, and it’s weird. “General HR?”

“And I ended up having to go year-by-year. It’s too old—turns out the overall search breaks when you set the window back that far.” Cloud makes a face at the terminal, which tells Zack the struggle was not only real but would’ve resulted in a couple destroyed devices if Cloud wasn’t as inhumanly patient as he is. “But it’s a real file. Cross-references with enough other stuff, it doesn’t look like some joke.”

Zack nods absently, not because he’s not listening to the other man because he definitely is, but because he’s trying to switch the login in that window to his own without losing the results. It takes some finagling, but those couple drinking sessions with Reno and that dodgy guy on Tuesti’s team were totally worth explaining his hangovers to medical, because he makes it happen. And his credentials give him a couple more ways than Cloud to test the metadata, which all checks out.

“But that’s it,” Cloud says, having waited for Zack to finish all of that without so much as going for the half-eaten sandwich by his side of the terminal. “Can’t find anything else, unless we try R&D—”

“That’s a blanket no, I promised Ang. And anyway, that way always just ends up giving you nightmares and I like you, Strife,” Zack mutters under his breath. He pushes back a little from the screen, thinking; despite what he’s saying, he knows this isn’t enough to bring back to Angeal. They’ve got Sephiroth’s physical parameters and know where he’d get seeded in a tournament but they know nothing new about where he came from, what he was doing in Corel, and exactly what happened to him. “Did you check the originating recruiter?”

Zack’s sliding back over to his terminal at the same time, since he’s got his email open there. He starts typing up an interim status update to Angeal, but then realizes Cloud hasn’t answered him. He looks over and Cloud twitches a little.

“Yeah,” Cloud says. He pauses for long enough that Zack almost asks again. “Nibelheim.”

“Well, that’s a mistake,” Zack says immediately. He turns away and fully faces Cloud, who’s looking at him but whose expression hasn’t changed at all. “I mean, Nibelheim didn’t have a recruiting station back then. They didn’t—”

Now Cloud emotes. It’s just the faintest flicker of irritation, and on anyone else it’d probably be written off as just a stray blink but on Cloud’s kind of face, it stands out. “Yeah, I know. But that’s what it says.”

Zack opens his mouth. Then closes it, because he doesn’t want to come off like he’s accusing Cloud of doing shitty work when he knows the man delivers solid results. And he’s kind of coming off that way, but it’s just…this is so fucking weird. He drags his hand through his hair, trying to think through it, and just doesn’t come up with anything.

“I was trying to remember,” Cloud says after a few seconds pass. He’s not looking annoyed anymore, and instead is dropping his gaze to the floor, a little like when he and Zack first met and he seemed to think any time someone else was upset in his presence somehow came back to him. “Nobody wanted to talk to Hojo, or let him talk to any of the kids—they even would warn him off me and Ma. But it wasn’t like they could make him keep quiet if he wanted to say something.”

“So he said something about this Sephiroth? Because there’s no way they’re Nibelheim-born, right? You would’ve said something to me before this about a six-foot-plus superstar with silver hair and green eyes,” Zack says, with a laugh to soften it.

Mistake, because honestly, he just sounds rattled. Cloud being Cloud, the man just lets that pass and tries to directly answer Zack. “He never said the name, but now that I think about it, he’d rant about how us idiots had already forgotten he’d started with the best—what’d he say, the…the ‘best beyond the comprehension of human scum,’ right. But then there’s the other—Ma once told me he was mad because we’d all forgotten him and it hadn’t been that long since the last time.”

“Like…what, he’d been to Nibelheim before?” Zack says after a moment. He looks at his email, then back at Cloud as Cloud nods. Then he scoots his chair over to Cloud’s terminal again to look at the file reminding him that yeah, there had been an R&D unit at Nibelheim that far back. “You know, Spike, maybe that is the way to go here—follow the crazy scientist, not the SOLDIER. Just—”

“Stay out of R&D, I know,” Cloud says. He’s already got his hands back on the keys. “It’s gonna take longer.”

“Well, we need it when we need it. If you don’t have it by then, I’ll handle it with Angeal and you can just keep working on it while he’s in transit, and maybe through the meet ‘n greets too. Those always happen even if you’ve got a full morgue,” Zack says, rolling his eyes at all the formalities someone somewhere decided have to go with business trips. “Just keep—”

Their phones both beep, and at the same time a notification flashes in Zack’s inbox from the receptionist. Zack frowns on top of his frown, but Cloud seems to know what it is.

“She came by earlier looking for Angeal, but you were still in the roster meeting and she said it wasn’t a rush, just that she wanted to catch him before he leaves,” Cloud says. “I thought he was coming back with you so I told her to come back later.”

Zack sighs as he hits the option on the notification that’ll let the receptionist know he’s coming down. “Yeah, that—it’s not you, Spike, that totally made sense at the time. Just Ang got detoured because Gen’s flying in—”

Cloud’s eyes widen.

“No, don’t worry about it, you got this and this here—” Zack points at Cloud’s terminal “—this is your priority. Anyone wants to fight on that, you point them to me. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Cloud says.

He bends back over his terminal and Zack leaves him to it. That means Cloud’s not looking when Zack gives himself a once-over, grimaces and runs both hands through his hair, mentally mourning not going for the dress uniform today and then catching himself being a nervous moron. He’s got to stop that, Zack tells himself as he goes out to see Aerith.

Aerith is the daughter of Angeal’s girlfriend. She and her mom live with Angeal, and every time Zack sees her, he can’t help thinking she’d be the prettiest girl he’d ever seen if she didn’t always look so worried.

That’s really all him, and he tries his damnedest to not let it come out or make it make life awkward for her or for Angeal. “Hey,” Zack says as she turns towards him. “I’m really sor—”

Aerith’s face falls, and deep down Zack sticks the tiny bit of him that always falls too when he sees that. But then, because she’s the undisputed nicest person he’s ever met and that holds true no matter how she happens to look, she straightens up and smiles at him. “Hi, Zack. I really hope nothing bad is going on? It’s after dinnertime for you, I wasn’t expecting you to still be in too.”

Zack shrugs and swipes her through the security gate behind the receptionist. “Nah, you know me, I live and breathe SOLDIER, it’s not like I’m gonna let a little dinner get in the way of that. Look, I am actually not exactly sure where Angeal is but I’ll walk you to his office and then go grab him.”

She comes through and they walk down the hall past a couple cubicles before Aerith replies, using a low voice. “It’s okay, Zack, he already said he wasn’t coming home tonight. But Momma’s having a bad day, and she kept saying it’s not because she’s worried about them getting deployed early but I just want her to lie down and rest. I told her I’d come and check that he’s still here so she can get some sleep.”

“Sorry to hear that. Is it the headaches?” Zack asks. Most of the office has emptied out but he drops his voice to match hers. He’s genuinely sympathetic, but to be honest, also doesn’t mind the chance to have her shifting closer to hear him. “I can make a swing by the med center and pick up something if you’re running low.”

That earns him another smile, but it’s paired with a headshake. “No, I don’t think that’s going to help, but I appreciate you offering. You’re really thoughtful.”

“Yeah…well, let me know if there’s something I can get for you,” Zack says. Lamely, but aside from the migraines, he’s never actually found out what exactly is wrong with Ifalna. All he knows is that it can get so bad that Angeal has a couple medical specialists’ private numbers, and more than once has yanked Zack out of bed to drive them over because they can’t take her to a hospital. “Here we go.”

They’re at Angeal’s office door, which is standing open. Aerith has been to it before, and is on a first-name basis with all of the assistants and even the day janitors for the floor, but for some reason she hesitates just outside. When she finally sticks a foot over the threshold, she pivots quickly on it and reaches towards Zack as he starts to back up.

“Do you have to go look for him?” she says. And then blushes, which is just the most adorable thing—or would be, if she didn’t have those faint shadows under her eyes. “I’m sorry, that sounds ridiculous. Honestly, if he’s not responding to me, he’s—it’s important and I shouldn’t be interrupting it. I just wanted to make Momma stop fretting. I can go home now, she saw me go out and I’ve been out long enough she’ll know I didn’t just go around the corner.”

“No, come on, you came all the way here.” Zack takes his phone out of his pocket and starts messaging Angeal as he talks, using one of their more private channels. It’s not the emergency one, not yet, but he’s more than halfway ready to go there if he doesn’t get a response in the next couple minutes. “It’s not a big deal. How bad is your mom? I mean, he’ll want to know no matter what.”

“I think she’s worrying too much,” Aerith says, and the slow way she pulls out the words makes it clear she’s being diplomatic. But she’s also worrying over something herself, staring into the office while rubbing at that necklace she always wears, a nervous habit of hers. “It’s not like she can do much about it.”

“Ang wouldn’t just sneak off without telling anyone. And if somebody made him—well, first, I’d like to see that because that would be epic,” Zack says. And then regrets how that comes out just a little too enthusiastic, even if Aerith smiles politely at him for the effort. “Second and more importantly, one of us would know. Me or Cloud or all of us who’re Angeal’s guys, we’d find out, and we’d—well, we’d get him back but also we’d tell you. Trust me, I’m not going to let anyone hurt you like that.”

And again, hitting it a little too hard, and Zack is really not the kind of guy who’s just seeing this as an opportunity to sell himself. He really isn’t. He just—he just wishes Aerith didn’t look like that whenever she thinks he’s not looking, like she’s checking for someone to jump out from behind a file cabinet.

Then she inhales and draws herself back out of the office. “No, I really should go home to Momma,” she says, seemingly to herself, but then she looks up at Zack. “Though if you see Angeal—can you just give him a message?”

Zack opens his mouth, then shuts it before he can just nail up that stupid flag and instead takes out his phone, finger poised over it. He nods.

For some reason, Aerith looks as if he’s just saved her from a gang of bikers. “Good, but I don’t think you should write it,” she says, still beaming at him. “I know this sounds silly and that’s why I didn’t want to just message him, but I think it’d make Momma feel better.”

“Oh, sure, no problem,” Zack says. He puts his phone away, then gives his temple a little flick. “Memory drive ready whenever you are.”

Aerith giggles a little, but then sobers up as she gives the message. “Momma wasn’t feeling too well this morning so she tried to take a nap after lunch, and she just had this strange dream. She wanted to tell him about it as soon as he got home, but then he messaged and she’s been…” she sighs “…up and down and trying to distract herself and making herself feverish instead. It’s not a headache yet but I’m worried if she doesn’t get to sleep tonight.”

“Dream, okay, got it.” Zack taps his temple again. “Saved.”

This time Aerith’s smile is a little more strained. But surprisingly, it’s not at his bad jokes, or else she wouldn’t be reaching out to him as he turns back towards reception. “It sounds silly,” she says, and then her eyes flick from side to side. “She didn’t even want to tell me it was a dream, I had to really press her, but I know she talks to Angeal about them. But she’s really sensitive about it—they would make her try to see things when she was in testing, so I think it reminds her.”

“Oh,” Zack says, and that is beyond lame but it’s either that or get upset at R&D, and if he did that every single time…he can’t if he wants to get things done.

So he just nods, and walks Aerith back out, but when he’s going back to where he left Cloud, he does slow down a little so he can make sure he’s going to keep it under the lid. First Angeal’s little coffee accident, and then Genesis coming in and now Ifalna…Zack’s no conspiracy theorist but it’s not a theory if it’s true. And what is true is that Ifalna and Angeal met because Angeal got her out of R&D’s hands, her and Aerith, and away from whatever the hell they were doing to her after her husband died. And the reason they don’t go to hospitals now is even Angeal doesn’t trust R&D to not try to get her back, even though the head of it is his—

Zack hears a voice that shouldn’t be on this floor and stops a couple yards from the door. A second later, that opens and Rufus Shinra casually swans out of it like he just meanders down from his swank office all the time. “Commander Fair,” he says. “Good evening, I hope?”

“It’s working for me. So far,” Zack says as neutrally as he can. “Something I can do for you? Need to leave a message for General Hewl—”

“Oh, no, I know he’s occupied,” Rufus replies, and then he turns and saunters off towards the elevator bank.

Zack is hoping that…but no, Cloud’s still in the room. The moment he sees Zack, he shakes his head.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“Spike, listen, I know training makes you think nobody cares about you beyond how much they gotta bash off before you fit into the perfect SOLDIER mold, but training’s over and you’re on my good for life list,” Zack says as he starts working along the walls, checking every crack and seam. “Besides, Rufus Shinra is not one you have to take for the te—”

Cloud sighs. “Zack, if the Turks were going to tap this room, they wouldn’t have done it right before he came in. You were in here with me before.”

“Yeah, but also…” Then Zack turns and sees Cloud’s face. “Look, I just know them, okay? And I don’t know Rufus that much, but I don’t think you or I want to get to know—”

“You remember he was in Nibelheim for two years, right? Running the reactor retrofit project?” Cloud says with a pained expression on his face. “I already know him.”

Zack blinks.

“I thought you knew that,” Cloud says. The pained expression doesn’t exactly go away, but does gain a layer very specific to people who’ve been an assistant to someone else for at least a year. “He signed off on Ma’s disability pension. He just saw me and remembered but he was just here for a second. And I blacked out all the screens.”

“Right, good. Right on protocol,” Zack says. Then he shakes his head. He looks at Cloud again, and when the other man sighs a second time, he gives up and takes a seat. He did know Rufus was there when Cloud’s mother had her accident and Cloud first tried to join SOLDIER, and it’s a small town, and he honestly does need to give Cloud credit for being awesome and not let his own head swell up for spotting it. But it just…

It's just too much weird, but then he’s annoyed at himself for thinking it. Being a selfish asshole when there are other things going on, and anyway if Rufus Shinra has a tiny piece of human under that perfect icy suit of his, Zack should be applauding that.

“Was Aerith here for Angeal?” Cloud asks.

Zack starts. “Oh, yeah, but he’s—I’m gonna have to catch him at some point, but she shouldn’t have to wait in the office for that,” he says. “I sent her home. Let’s just get a little more together and then I’ll run him down.”

Cloud nods, and just like that, they’re back in the groove. “Yeah, so I pulled Hojo’s files, what we can get, and here’s what I found…”

Notes:

For some reason I don't write Zack nearly as much as you'd think, with how much I like doing so. Anyway, his storyline originally sprang out of some musings about what the alt-Zack in the Remakes might have gone through, but I would very much say that was a starting point and not the end point.

I am trying to keep to the canonical timeline, so Sephiroth was intended to be just shy of twenty in the first two chapters, and Ifalna is very much an Older Woman here. I'm also not tagging her and Angeal as a pairing because spoilers.

Chapter 4: Present

Looking up Hojo doesn’t get them that much more than looking up Sephiroth had, but it does get Zack a crash course in the difference between Midgar and Shinra’s regional operations. He did know that, coming from Gongaga, but when he was living in Gongaga he didn’t actually work for Shinra yet, so he could just sit back and complain with everyone else about why Shinra could flip a switch in Midgar to turn on the lights down here but couldn’t seem to remember where you lived a year ago.

Now he’s got to be the guy who figures it out, and as far as he can tell…he can’t figure it out from here. Sure, all he needs to search digital records is a keyboard, but there’s a lot of gaps because a lot of stuff clearly hasn’t been digitized yet. Hojo’s stuff is old enough that it looks like they were scanning a bunch of paper files and then using text recognition to export data, except they were choosing what to scan by just grabbing it out of boxes at random and the text recognition liked to mix in extra languages whenever possible.

Zack and Cloud end up digging up as many original scans as they can and literally reading through them themselves, rather than trying to kill themselves interpreting the typos. They manage to reconstruct a timeline of Hojo’s postings, which mostly involve Midgar plus a couple stints in Nibelheim, but nothing around Corel. There are some partial disciplinary records too, but not enough detail in them to figure out exactly who was complaining about Hojo or who else could’ve been involved. Which does seem like more than just bad archiving, since it’s not like there aren’t personnel records showing a lot of people worked for R&D even back then—but that means they can’t narrow down exactly who Hojo was in contact with on a regular basis.

“I’ll keep working on it,” Cloud says. He turns back to his terminal, trying to hide his yawn. “I’ve still got a lot of searches to run.”

It’s on the tip of Zack’s tongue to tell the man to go home, because the keyword list is still in play but at the rate they’re going…but they have to. “Yeah, I’ll come back after I check in with Angeal and help you at least close them out,” he says, checking his phone. “So much…this really wasn’t that long ago, it’s not like some people weren’t around back then.”

Cloud snorts as he pokes at his keyboard. “So you’re going to interview…Heidegger? Or Tseng?”

“Yep, schedule me for first thing tomorrow,” Zack says. He waits till Cloud whips around to stare at him, then can’t help cracking up. It’s late, but they both need a little humor break. “Kidding! Kidding, you know I wouldn’t do that to you, Spike. Even if I wanted to do it to myself.”

“Yeah, you’ve got other problems,” Cloud mutters. His shoulders slouch in relief, and when Zack claps one on the way out the door, he briefly lifts one hand in a see-you wave.

Angeal’s finally back in his office. Zack has been texting him every half-hour since Aerith left to try and get the man, but whenever Angeal replied it was just to say he’d be around in another fifteen so hold off till then. He never actually said why he kept blowing his own deadlines, but Zack has the explanation before he even knocks on the door.

Genesis is in there with Angeal and worked up about something, despite the sound-buffering insulation. Zack can’t make out the actual words but he can the increasing volume and he winces. For a second he thinks about going back down the hall and seeing if he can get some coffee or maybe he should break into someone’s drawer stash for some sweets, anything to try and placate Genesis—unlike a lot of people, he doesn’t think Genesis is angry all the time just to be angry, and Genesis is out in the field a lot more than Angeal and doesn’t keep a regular assistant to check that he eats in between battalion maneuvers.

But before he can, the door swings open. Genesis is standing there, deeply expectant and deeply unenthused about it. “Fair,” he says, turning sharply away and letting one hand trail back in a peremptory gesture to come in. “Tell us what else is more important than a thirty-mile chunk of the border?”

“I never said—” Angeal starts defensively. Then he cuts himself off. He’s standing behind Genesis, one hand yanking at one shoulder and fading marks further up that side of his neck like he’s been digging there too. “Look, Zack, whatever it is—”

“Oh, as if it’s going to make any difference whatsoever.” Genesis throws himself down onto the couch, head going back so that he can glower at the ceiling. His arm trails over the side, but then moves again when Zack hesitates. “In, Fair. At least that way we can stop broadcasting to the world.”

“That’s just me and the rats,” Zack says as he comes in and then shuts the door. “Everybody else went home.”

Genesis flicks a look over, then huffs as he straightens his clothing. He pulls his head off the couch just enough to meet Angeal’s eyes and then they both look down at the coffeetable in front of the couch, where their phones are lying as if somebody tossed them there in a hurry. Then Genesis huffs again and puts his head back, while Angeal visibly composes himself and looks at Zack.

“Really sorry, it’s just I’m gonna head out in a couple and I promised Aerith…she, uh, she came by earlier,” Zack says, and then pauses because Genesis can blow hot or cold on the topic of Aerith and Ifalna, the same way that a volcano can deliver you pyroclastic clouds and nuclear winter.

Whatever’s going on at the border, it’s bad enough that Genesis merely rolls his eyes. “Keep going, Fair. You weren’t hanging around just for that.”

“Headache?” Angeal says, though he’s watching Genesis. “Or is it a dizzy—”

“No, neither. It’s…” Zack pauses again, wishing he could’ve caught Angeal alone. It’s not that he’s worried he’s betraying a confidence; Genesis is one of the few people Angeal trusts to stay with Ifalna and Aerith when he’s out of town and probably knows more about Ifalna’s medical issues than Zack does. But this is overall bad timing, screaming loud and clear from Genesis’ slumped posture to the fingertips Angeal keeps twitching against his leg. “Nightmares. And now Ifalna’s worried you’re going to, uh, ship out unexpectedly and she wants to talk to you first, but I think Aerith’s working on settling her down. Aerith didn’t say you had to come home, she just wanted to make sure you knew about it.”

Angeal stiffens, which is definitely the opposite of what Zack had been aiming for. It’s not as bad as earlier, and not just because he’s not holding a cup of hot coffee, but it’s still—Zack takes a half-step back. Of course then Angeal grimaces and backs up himself, moving to the far end of the couch and twisting a chair around so he can drop into it.

“Got it. Thanks, Zack,” Angeal says. He rubs absently at one knee before taking a long breath. “She doesn’t need to worry that much—I’m not going off without telling her.”

To be totally honest, the way Angeal says that is less than convincing—or really, it sounds like he’s working as hard to convince himself as he is Zack, and that isn’t like him. But it’s late and Angeal’s clearly got a lot going, so while Zack isn’t planning to ignore it, he’s also not going to call the man on it right now.

Sadly, Genesis has other ideas. “It’s hardly paranoia if it’s true,” he snorts, levering himself upright again. “You know damned well what Heidegger’s going to say, and Scarlet will back him up on it. She’s dying for a reason to make us take out her prototype.”

A flash of anger goes over Angeal’s face, but then he just runs his fingers through his hair instead of telling Genesis off. “Deusericus knows you’re not lying about the shortages, and what we’re supposed to do with—”

“You know what we’re supposed to do—we’re Firsts and generals, Angeal, and specially engineered to run on nothing but glory and bloodlust. How dare we ask for adequate supplies before we’ve finished conquering the world,” Genesis says in a scathing tone. But he’s tired too, his eyelids fluttering briefly before he rubs one hand over them. “The Wutaians launched a surprise attack and took back two of the villages around Fort Tamblin. It cut off two companies and we had to call in air support to get them back.”

“Oh, shit,” Zack says before thinking.

Then he winces, but Genesis actually laughs in only a half-mocking way. “Indeed. The frontline is all the way back at Da-Chao now, and only holding there because the Wutaians literally don’t have enough people to guard that much of an advance.”

What he doesn’t say is that that basically undoes the entire first half of the current campaign. The execs are already pointing fingers over who decided the Wutaians had gotten sufficiently beaten-up the last time around and so missed all the build-up for this war, and this is just going to make all of that worse. SOLDIER is the best fighting force out there and that’s not just Zack talking, but it takes twice as long to train up a SOLDIER as an unenhanced regular. Nobody wants to talk about it but Zack knows that they started out this war at only eighty percent of what SOLDIER was before the second Wutai War, and they’ve only been dropping since.

“Did they come out with some new materia?” Zack can’t help asking. “A couple Leviathans or something like that?”

Angeal sucks his breath a little and shoots a glance at Genesis before giving Zack a warning look. But before Zack can take back his question and just excuse himself, Genesis answers him. “No to both. Same materia as always, but some new, very unique combinations, plus basic strategic principles. For example, don’t expect the people you’ve just defeated to guard your supplies for you while you march on for the next photo op.”

“We’ll deal with it,” Angeal says. “We’ve still got enough reserves, and I’ll fucking deal with Hollander if I have to. You don’t have to take this one, Gen.”

Who abruptly gets up from the couch and uses one hand to yank his coat towards himself when Angeal reaches towards him. “No, but if I don’t, I don’t know what I’m going to be saddled with going back there, and I prefer my idiots to at least be human,” Genesis says sharply as he scoops up his phone. “But do let me know if Ifalna sees anything helpful for once.”

Angeal stiffens. Then he gets halfway up, but slows since Genesis is already most of the way out the door. He stares after the other man for nearly a minute, a lot of things warring for space on his face—Zack ends up pulling out his phone and pretending to check his messages because doing otherwise feels too much like rubbernecking. Then he hears Angeal let out a frustrated sigh.

“That was it,” Zack says, and then cautiously looks up. “Sorry. Probably should’ve messaged it but Aerith seemed a little cagey—”

“No. No, you did right. It’s just…there’s a lot of shit on the ground right now. Gen’s upset about it and has reason, but just…don’t worry about what he said, that’s for him and me to work out,” Angeal mutters. He gives the partly-closed door—for once Genesis didn’t slam it behind him—a glance and then turns away, going over to his desk. “Listen, message taken, now go home and get some rest. I’m not going to, so I need you at least rolling straight, so you can keep me straight tomorrow. I’m gonna have a lot—you’re gonna have to do some rearranging.”

“Sure. That’s the job, just let me know,” Zack says.

Angeal nods. He’s already rummaging around on his desk. “Might need you to manage Gen’s calendar for a few things too, he’s gonna be with me for a lot of the meetings—but make sure we talk about Corel before lunch. We can’t lose track of that one.”

“Got it, on it, love it,” Zack says.

The disbelieving snort Angeal gives him is about as close to normal as Zack has seen him yet, and so Zack feels a little bit better about closing the door on the other man. A little.

He feels a lot better after he’s gone through Angeal’s calendar on the way back to Cloud and cut out as much obvious fat as he can. He has a couple guesses about which of the genuine muscle Angeal’s gonna have him sacrifice, but he can’t move on that till Angeal gives him the heads-up so he pries himself away from his screen and…discovers an empty room.

Frowning, Zack looks back at his phone, only to see he missed a couple messages from Cloud and one email. The messages say Cloud ran all the searches without him because that little came back, and the email has a link to the drive where Cloud put everything. Cloud also says he thinks they’ve exhausted all the digitized records and might just have to make friends with Records to find where they keep the paper that hasn’t been scanned yet, and that he’ll get on that tomorrow.

That might send up a few more flags than they want to deal with now, given the Wutai mess and the extra scrutiny on SOLDIER. Zack texts back his thanks and that they should regroup first before Cloud wastes his time, and then heads home. He still feels like not enough is done, but he’ll check in the morning and probably have his instructions by then. That’s enough to get him to sleep.

* * *

The next day, Zack gets up at dawn and chugs the frappucino Cloud brings him, then gets to work. A list of reprioritized stakeholders from Angeal is in his inbox, so he moves things around and argues with offended administrative assistants and figures out how to get Genesis’ clothes to dry-cleaning and back in time for a mid-morning sit-down with the President. Zack’s half-expecting that to run over and so he’s semi-thinking he’ll have just enough time to sneak out and grab noodles from Angeal’s favorite place around the corner when Angeal messages to let him know they’re going to have the meeting about Corel in a conference room instead of Angeal’s office.

The conference room isn’t the same one the President uses, but is closer than to Angeal’s office, so Zack walks in thinking Angeal just ducked out for a few minutes to get a check-in. So he’s honestly blindsided by the fact that Angeal, Tseng, Cissnei, and Genesis are all in there.

“Sorry,” Angeal starts, seeing Zack’s expression. “You didn’t miss anything, Zack, I just didn’t tell you. I didn’t have time—”

“We’re both needed in Wutai,” Genesis cuts in. “The President has agreed to send another battalion out under Angeal, so for matters within our borders, we’ll have to look to our colleagues to assist.”

The look Genesis gives Tseng at the word ‘colleagues’ would send hardened sergeants running for the hills, but Tseng just does his placid statue thing against the far wall. Cissnei does catch Zack’s eye but then clicks her gaze away before he can make any kind of sympathy face at her. Which probably is just as well, since then Angeal clears his throat.

“Everything just landed in your inbox,” he says to Zack. “Sorry about how last-minute it is, but we were deciding things up till just now. The Turks will be co-leading the Corel investigation.”

“No problem, sir, last minutes are the best minutes,” Zack says, patting his phone in his pocket. It is a little bit of a surprise that the President signed off on sending Angeal that quickly, but it was definitely going that way last night. “I’ll get all the usual things together, just let me know who to send it to—”

Genesis lets out a disbelieving snort, but then Angeal wheels around and gives him a dirty look for it. That’s the first surprise, and then the second is Genesis actually looking—well, not ashamed over it, but definitely ratcheting down the irritation in his expression a couple notches.

“You’re going instead of me, Zack.” Then Angeal stops. The edges of his face twitch as if he’s veering towards an upset, but then he smooths everything out and does the expression he usually reserves for troop rallies and board meetings. “SOLDIER still has the biggest stake in this, and Gen and I need to know that we don’t have something blowing up at our backs while we’re taking care of things in Wutai. I know you’ve already been digging into this one, so you’re the best one for doing that in Corel too, Commander Fair. You and Cissnei are heading out this evening.”

“It’s a four PM plane,” Zack blurts out. He immediately winces and then his training kicks in. “Yes, sir. I’m honored.”

Genesis snorts again, then peels himself away from the table and walks around Angeal, whose face is starting to get pretty masklike. “Let’s not look for medals in cesspits, Fair,” he says. “We did do you the courtesy of moving to a later flight so you can brief Commander Hendriksen before you go—she’ll be handling admin in your absence. Which isn’t nearly fascinating enough to deserve the additional scrutiny, Tseng?”

Which isn’t really a question. Cissnei’s lips tighten, but when Tseng just silently turns and moves out in Genesis’ wake without so much as a blink, she follows his lead. The door swings shut behind them and Zack instinctively goes to check that it’s gone all the way.

He stops when Angeal sighs. “I’m sorry about this, Zack,” Angeal says. “But Wutai is—look, you’ll catch up on the reports but let me tell you now it’s a lot worse than what they say.”

“No, I get it,” Zack says, turning back around. “And I’m not gonna hold it against Michelle either, she’s good and it’s not her fault she got tapped. I’ll give Cloud all the—”

“No, Cloud’s going with you,” Angeal says. He’s abrupt about it and from the way he looks, he knows it but that’s not what he’s uneasy about. “Listen, I know we never got to catch up on the Sephiroth research either but I already don’t like what we have. Corel’s important too, and not just because of the mines. It’s putting SOLDIER’s name on the line, and the last thing we need with Wutai right now is someone saying my father missed something when he took over R&D.”

That makes Zack do a double-take. It’s not in the official records but they all know how Angeal and Hollander are related—Hollander brings it up, a lot, and never in a way that helps Angeal out—and also, all know how Angeal hates ever acknowledging it.

And that could explain it but…something’s still sticking out. But he doesn’t get to really dwell on that right then because Angeal keeps going. “Look, we’re not asking you to go in there and take it out, whatever it is,” Angeal says. “But we need to know what it is, and if I can’t go myself, I need to get the details from someone who’s not going to run it by him first.”

“You know I’m solid for that,” Zack says. He’s a bit—not offended, he knows Angeal doesn’t mean it that way, but he is a bit surprised Angeal even has to say so. “So Cissnei—”

“If anybody needs to get taken out, let her do it.” Angeal shakes his head almost as soon as he finishes. “I know that doesn’t sound right, but this is—we had a long talk with Tseng on this, there are reasons—I’ll just say me and Gen both agree here. You honestly don’t want to know all the details.”

Zack nods, but he can feel himself dragging a little on that. And Angeal is looking right at him, he knows the other man sees it too. Angeal’s expecting him to say something so no sense in pretending. “I get that, Ang, but—look, I have no problem taking out my sword if it comes down to it. Civilians are dead and that’s what the job is, and—”

Angeal’s brows arch, and for a second the man’s face lightens up. “Puppy, listen,” he says, with a quick clap to Zack’s shoulder. “If it was just about that, I wouldn’t be here talking to you, I’d be booting your ass home to pack. I know you and you’ll do the right thing…” and then he sobers again “…this is just a mess, Zack, and it’s not—it’s not ours. It’s definitely not just ours. Just go there and tell me what you find. If Cissnei crosses you, call me, but she’s not there to babysit you. The Turks have their own questions to follow up on, is what I’m saying.”

And if they’re going to do it by being Turks, then don’t save them from it, Zack hears. Which still isn’t what he’d like to hear, but it’s not as if he hasn’t heard it before, and whenever it’s gotten down to a question of whose judgment to follow, his or a Turk, Angeal has always had his back before. So he nods without hesitating this time.

“I don’t think this should really come to that. I think it’s probably just some scare tactic, and once they see real SOLDIERs on the ground, they’ll stop going for the poor civvies and go back to their holes,” Angeal says after another moment. He pats Zack on the arm again. “I want you to take Cloud because even if there is a fight, it’ll probably be cleaner than what’s going to happen here. It’s not that I don’t think either of you could hold up, but the shit that Gen and I are going to have to go through with the board…I’d rather you’re around to help us out when we’re done.”

“Well, listen, Ang, I go wherever you tell me. You say you need me more in Corel, then I’ll go to Corel and show Spike how we handle things outside the office,” Zack says.

He has to admit, he still gets a little glow in his chest when Angeal looks at him like that and nods. General Hewley, signing off with approval on the kid from Gongaga, that’s always going to be something Zack is proud of.

So that’s that. They go through a couple administrative things and then Angeal heads off to go find Genesis and make a few calls—he does drop that he’s already called Ifalna and Aerith, even though he doesn’t owe Zack a follow-up—while Zack starts wrapping up things on his end. They’ve already told Cloud and when he responds to Zack’s message, he says he got them go-bags if Zack doesn’t have time to run home. No freak-out, no storm of questions, just head-down working-it-out Strife.

Zack does have a lot to do, but he manages to squeeze in a quick trip to pick up a couple things from his quarters. He tosses them in the nearest bag he can find and then turns to go back to the office…and then turns around to look at his place.

Not at it, but just…he’s thinking again, that maybe now it fits. Angeal is a pretty open book about most things, but not about what exactly Hollander got down to in the early SOLDIER trials. This Sephiroth was supposed to be sponsored by Hojo, and they know that none of Hojo’s recommendations worked out, in spectacularly bad ways. Hollander’s always said that, always made a big deal out of how it was only after he took over that they started getting stable results with recruits, but he also said that he’d cleaned up all of Hojo’s accidents. If he didn’t, or if he had more to do with Hojo’s work than he’s been letting on…it fits. Angeal would know enough to suspect right away, even just looking at grainy footage, and then he’d be thinking about how this would make people look at current SOLDIERs. None of them are supposed to have gone through any Hojo-era treatments, after all.

It could fit. So what Zack just has to do, he thinks as he pushes through his door, is go to Corel and check whether things there point the same way too. Once Angeal knows for sure, they’ll know what to do.

Chapter 5: Past

The first sensation that returns to Sephiroth is the low, strangely cold throbbing in his arm. He has that tucked up against himself and he presses it harder against his chest as he wakes, but then realizes that the throbbing is coming from the side pointed away from himself. So he pushes his arm out, only to fall roughly into full consciousness as his body unbalances.

He’d been lying on his side, knees half-tucked up in a fetal position, on some kind of pad that ends abruptly, leaving his limbs spilling over onto bruising stone or concrete. His back had been up against the wall, and when he’d moved, he’d unintentionally pushed off that onto his belly.

When he lands, pain jars loose in other places—his back, his knees, his throat and then he remembers. His rough inhale temporarily scratches out the rest of the world as he works up one hand and draws it across his neck…there’s a bandage. He’s been treated.

Sephiroth pulls his arms under himself and turns his head. His hair is still in the way, but he doesn’t have the energy to move his arms again, not that soon, so he jerks his head about until enough strands fall out of the way for him to see where he is.

A solitary light bulb, framed by sternly vertical black lines against a backdrop of cragged ones. Shadows on either side, more on the right than on the left. More light sources outside of his field of vision, but all artificial and the air is damp, minerally, with that flatness that tells him he’s deep underground. He’s still in the mines.

There’s also someone else here with him. As his breathing slows he can hear theirs, coming from the far corner well beyond the bars. He hears it change a little as his leg spasms on its own, stiff muscles suddenly releasing, but not in a way that signals alarm, and something about the change makes his skin prickle all over. Threat, is what he instinctively thinks.

He resists the urge to throw back his head and stare at it straight in the face, and instead pushes his leg out along the edge of the pad. His heel comes off the end, and then when he stretches his foot down, his toes scrape against metal. That’s one side of the cage, he thinks, and the one in front of him extends about two yards, so if he turned perpendicular he’d still be able to lie flat, but only just. The other end…he pulls his leg back in, then levers off that knee and backwards onto the pad till his back is against the wall again. Then he pushes up that into a sitting position, grunting as more muscles snap out of their cramped state.

Sephiroth has obviously been lying here for some time, but unless his internal body clock has been wildly thrown off—admittedly, he can’t rule that out yet—it can’t have been more than a day. Hunger is clawing at his stomach, and when he swallows he notices how cottony the inside of his mouth is, signaling thirst. He has a bandage wrapped about his throat and shoulder and another around his throbbing arm, plus under his opposite elbow he can feel scratchy, peeling patches of skin-glue across his ribs. The way that the bandages move against him, he can tell that his injuries have already knitted and if they weren’t so serious as to need surgical attention, then that’s somewhere between six and twelve hours.

Though he’s not fully healed. There’s still tenderness and swelling on the side of his neck, and stiffness in his shoulder that goes beyond mere lack of movement, and his forearm…he puts his other arm over it, but then decides to probe that later. Instead he puts his head back against the wall and tilts it to let his hair draw away from his face, and looks out.

It’s a repurposed room of some kind, probably storage from the number of brackets still bolted to the walls. Clearly part of regular operations at some point as its shape and size would’ve been too much work for wildcat miners or outlaws, and while the lightbulbs are basic, the wiring they’re attached to has been stapled to proper tracks. The cage Sephiroth is sitting in also seems to be part of the original set-up and not a retrofit, since the bars have a patina on them that matches the brackets. He recalls that the bigger mines often have a secure area where they store expensive and hazardous supplies such as explosives and guesses this was once an example.

“They’re socketed into the wall and ceiling,” says the corner. A male voice. “You would break your fingers trying to pull one out.”

Sephiroth had purposely focused on taking in his surroundings first, but he looks over now on reflex. He…can’t make much out, aside from general size, and even that is doubtful once he looks back at the lights and thinks through the angles.

“From personal experience?” he says.

They’re silent. It’s a very bare room, but there is a small half-wall built out of crates between them and Sephiroth. That still isn’t enough to account for the shadows defying the laws of physics in that corner, and there’s something else that keeps needling at Sephiroth, something that makes him tense and even to shift towards the opposite end of his cell when he’s not actively thinking against it.

Thinking against—and then he hisses as all at once, the memory of that other voice, that—that other mind in his head, trying to crush him out and take his body, coming back to him. He hikes himself back up against the wall without thinking, bashes his elbow against it and then drops heavily back down as the jolt runs through his entire arm and somehow seems to smash apart his ability to string one thought after another.

Sephiroth sits there in a daze for a while, cradling his arm and watching the halo around the bulb directly opposite him slowly grow, only to shrink whenever dryness forces him to blink. He’s…not her, he eventually manages to work out. He’s still…himself. But what…

It’s a testament to how mentally degraded he is that he somehow missed the door right next to the bulb, and so when it swings open, Sephiroth lurches back against the wall in surprise, even though there’s a line of bars and over twenty feet between him and the door.

Dr. Valentine—Valentine—steps into the room, with a cooler in one hand and a cocked handgun in the other. It’s not the same one he’d had with Sephiroth before: there are three activated materia glowing in its hilt, and the barrel has a much larger bore. He keeps it down as he looks at Sephiroth, a regretful expression on his face, but then raises it as he turns to where the other man is.

At the same time, he triggers some kind of barrier spell that raises a shimmering curtain between one end of Sephiroth’s cell and a point on the far wall roughly halfway between him and the crates. He keeps the pistol aimed at the barrier, even though it already should block any shots, until he’s walked across the room and is standing at the other end of Sephiroth’s cell. Then he holsters the gun and kneels down, opening up the cooler.

“I’m sorry about this,” Valentine says. He pulls out a prepared meal, discards its lid, and then pushes it up against the bars. Then he goes back into the cooler and pulls out a rack of small vials, the kind designed to work with hypodermic syringes. “I honestly wasn’t expecting you to be able to resist her. The other three succumbed right away.”

Sephiroth hikes his arm further up against his chest. He can use it if he has to—he has feeling down to the fingertips—but its strength is unreliable and he doesn’t have anything suitable for a weapon. His clothes are gone and his only garment is a pair of sweat-pants that don’t even have a drawstring, he notices as he covertly feels with his good hand. “You took them down—to her. Those stories about them coming across some bizarre rock were lies.”

“Yes, I took them down, but not to her. She’d already been introduced to their systems back in Midgar and had destroyed their minds. She was only hiding it until we forced her to reveal herself,” Valentine says. He speaks calmly and clearly, and despite his patent distaste for what he’s done, his hands don’t shake. He takes out a flat black case, but then looks up as Sephiroth hisses. After a moment, he puts that down by the vials without opening them, still looking at Sephiroth. “Jenova’s an alien being, Sephiroth. She’s not a human, and she wasn’t your biological mother. Lucrecia was your—Hojo took a fertilized egg out of her, spliced DNA from Jenova into it and then put it back into her to carry to term.”

“She said she was. Jenova. She called herself mother,” Sephiroth says. Angrily, and he has reason to be angry—he’s in a damned cell—but there’s something wrong about this, something wrong about the way he feels. Something—he shakes his head, then hisses again, jerking his hand up to his head. His…he has one head. One, not two, and that bizarre sensation of something falling away, that’s all in his—that’s not him. That’s not him. “She claimed—you’re claiming—”

“And I realize I am not providing any context for why you should trust my word over what Hojo has been telling you your entire life, but all I can do is tell you. Hojo didn’t stop after you were successfully born and he continued testing ways to modify humans with Jenova’s DNA. He persuaded a doctor rotating through here to infect the three people who died with her cells. They survived, but they began transforming into…into her. And she is alien. Her true form is completely inhuman.” Initially Valentine is as steady as before, but his voice abruptly weakens when he refers to the transformation. He has to stop for a moment to collect himself. “She also seems to have no interest in anything except trying to destroy us, and she’s very intelligent about that. I had to stop Henderson before he rewired that gas pocket into a giant bomb that would have shattered half the mountain.”

Him. He’s here. He’s here, and he’s thinking, and that moment where he’d felt someone else trying to rise up through him, that was just a terrible echo of his experiences. Sephiroth holds onto that thought and then he feels secure enough to actually consider Valentine’s words. The man lied to him, and is skilled enough at that that Sephiroth, who navigates Shinra’s executive levels every day, hadn’t picked up on it. So this may all be another lie.

But at the same time—this is not the same Valentine he’d been interacting with before. This man is much more…engaged, is the first word that comes to mind, and as annoying as that is, Sephiroth can’t quite dismiss the thought. Before, Valentine had come off as unusually sympathetic, but still well within the range of deadened professional that makes up the majority of Shinra. But now the man is genuinely earnest.

“Then there’s evidence of all this that you could have shown me. I don’t report to Hojo anym—I don’t do only what he tells me. I make my own judgments,” Sephiroth finally says. He squeezes his arm without thinking, then grimaces as his head briefly swims. He makes himself say the rest anyway. “And I’ve been in the public enough and haven’t turned into an alien yet.”

“You hadn’t been exposed to a trigger,” Valentine says.

That cuts sharply through the dizziness. “That’s what was in that shaft? How do you know? If Hojo had been starting up another pool of test subjects—I was watching out for that, I was trying—I would’ve—would’ve known—”

Valentine says something, but the words sound as if they’re coming from much farther away than they should—Sephiroth presses his head back against the wall, only to yelp and double over on himself when he seems to feel that fall away from him. He has the strangest impression as he tumbles shoulder-first onto the pad, as if he’s both falling and standing up, as if he’s—

Oh, no, he thinks frantically, furiously, as the world splits apart and then two different rooms float before him. No, no, he’s himself, he’s himself, he’s stuck here in a cage and looking out through the bars, not looking in and he—

—he—

—he hears her again. Her voice, distant and tinny but nevertheless reaching down into the very heart of him, stabbing at it and cutting to sever and lever him out of his own body. He refuses, he rejects, he revolts, he will not yield but he cannot seem to get away from her either, and then there’s a monstrous roar and he looks up and he’s now at the front of the cell, crumpled just inside the bars and just outside a huge demonic figure is worming one clawed hand between them for his head.

The voice in him—her voice—screams in fear and rage. She hates Chaos too, remembering their battles, and instinctively quails from them. Mind temporarily united, Sephiroth hurls himself back across the cell and up against the wall, just as a startlingly green flower unfolds across Chaos’ right leg.

It’s not a flower, it’s a wound. Chaos staggers, pawing at it, and then twists to the side. It doesn’t escape Sephiroth that her voice weakens at the same time. He lashes out and she screams at him, but she’s falling away and can’t overcome the momentum. She’s—she’s out.

And Sephiroth is back in his right mind, in time to watch Valentine shoot Chaos a second time. Then, as Chaos drops to one knee but continues snarling, Valentine hastily reloads. The man doesn’t push a clip into the gun but chambers an individual bullet, an unusually large one with a wavering green glow that catches Sephiroth’s eye.

Then it’s in, and Valentine is shooting Chaos a third time, sending them down to writhe in agony on the floor. The first two bullets went into the legs, while this one goes into the left arm—Valentine is avoiding kill zones. He rechambers a fourth bullet, but this one looks different. The glow oscillates differently, Sephiroth thinks.

Valentine lifts the gun but only halfway, in a guard position where he clearly is hoping to not have to use it. The barrier spell went down at some point, but the man should be able to put it back up, and Sephiroth isn’t certain why he wouldn’t. But it’s likely the same reason why Valentine’s first move, whenever Chaos’ spasming seems to slow, is to inch forward.

Chaos snarls and scrapes at the floor, then jerks their limbs so that stone chips fly in every direction. A few nick Valentine and he raises his free arm to protect his face but otherwise endures the bruising. Several strike the bars, and one skitters to within a few inches of Sephiroth, who flinches but then makes himself watch Chaos. They definitely are smaller now…smaller and leaner, and paler. And the long, tangled mane of black hair wasn’t there a moment ago.

In another second Chaos’ form has flowed into that of a curled-up, naked man, groaning lowly and trembling. Valentine hisses and the man abruptly goes silent—and then rears sharply back as Valentine takes a step forward.

“No,” the man snarls. His voice has inhuman resonance, but it’s still recognizably the one that had spoken to Sephiroth just before Valentine had entered. And his face is the same as the one who’d attacked Sephiroth in the tunnel. “No, I told you—”

“He needed to see, Vincent,” Valentine says sharply. But his expression is full of pain, and when this Vincent snarls again, he doesn’t heed its warning, but goes forward to grab Vincent by one arm. “Here’s the Cure.”

Vincent flails at Valentine, clearly uninterested in the help but apparently too weak to put any force behind the rejection. He still has several demonic traits: the red eyes, and his left hand and arm up to the forearm is sheathed in metallic-type plates, as well as bearing clawed fingers Sephiroth would have been warier of than Valentine seems to be. Vincent turns his face away as Valentine half-lifts, half-drags him up against a crate, but when Valentine pushes a bottle to his mouth, he drinks its contents.

Valentine has long since holstered the gun. When Vincent finishes the bottle, he takes out another one and wraps Vincent’s hands around it, holding them till the man has recovered enough to keep it up on his own. Then Valentine gives Vincent, whose face is averted but who is no longer resisting, a quick examination that has elements of standard field medicine to it, along with other checks that Sephiroth can’t immediately relate to a rationale but that he memorizes anyway. It’s only after that that Valentine backs up.

“If you looked into my research, you know I’ve spent most of my career investigating Chaos,” Valentine says.

Sephiroth realizes that the man is addressing him again. “Yes.”

Vincent makes a noise. It’s too low and scratchy to be intelligible to Sephiroth, but Valentine winces as if he’s familiar with it. Still, he steps quickly away from Vincent and back over to Sephiroth’s cell. “Chaos is much older than most people realize—much older than any other Summons entity. They’re actually contemporaneous with Jenova’s landing on this Planet and with the Cetra. You should be familiar with the Cetra, even though Hojo’s beliefs about them are completely incorrect.”

Valentine doesn’t stop in front of the cell as Sephiroth initially expected, although he does look at Sephiroth. Instead he goes around to where he’d been before, where the cooler and the prepared meal still are. The rack of vials, on the other hand, is half-empty, and when Valentine kneels and picks up three used casings and puts them in the rack, Sephiroth realizes the connection.

“The Cetra and Jenova are not the same, for one. That couldn’t be any farther from the truth—they were deadly rivals. Chaos was created by the Cetra in part as an anti-Jenova measure, and so whenever they encounter traces of her now, they have one and only one reaction to them.” Then Valentine stops and looks over at Vincent, who appears to be ignoring both of them now. He has no doubt about what he’s saying, but his expression is far from proud or righteous about it. “I expected that you wouldn’t have anything left of your original personality, that you’d be only another shell for her, the most advanced yet—but the way you talk and act, it’s different from the others we’ve run into. I started to think…but we couldn’t take the risk. I couldn’t—I can’t let you out, not until and unless we can find a way to neutralize her DNA in you.”

“Of course not,” Sephiroth rasps, and when Valentine looks at him in what seems like genuine inquiry, he spits out a cold laugh. “Rational enough, but then you could have let him and Chaos kill me. There’s no need to justify yourself to a dead man.”

“No,” Valentine says immediately, firmly, with a slight but unmistakable widening of the eyes that conscious liars can’t produce. “No. You were forcing her back even as Vincent was transforming—I could see her trying to manifest but you never transformed. If you can do that much now, there’s a possibility that we can do something for you. I won’t kill you while that’s true.”

Sephiroth closes his mouth, then stares at Valentine as the man bends back to the cooler. His immediate reaction is disbelief but also…well, disbelief again, but of a different kind. He can’t believe that anyone would be so altruistic when, taken from Valentine’s point of view, a clear, present, and overwhelming threat exists and the surer way to deal with said threat would be death. He also can’t believe that anyone would choose to help in such a way without something to gain from it, and the only gain he can think of is an opportunity to use him and his ‘Jenova’ DNA for some other purpose. And given that Valentine is already keeping a man down here who’s somehow able to manifest Chaos, that seems far more likely.

But again, Sephiroth thinks, it’d be easier to do that if he was dead, or at the very least, rendered comatose. And Vincent is clearly in poor shape, but with the barrier spell down, there isn’t any other obstacle to the man leaving the room. He’s not restrained or caged, and there are several long spells where Valentine’s back is turned and Vincent has a clear path to the exit but merely nurses his Cure Potion. Valentine has to be aware of that, and he’s clearly capable of a great deal of covert planning. He’d efficiently lured Sephiroth here and into a trap, and then…changed his mind at the very last minute? Because, of all things, Sephiroth had been convincingly human?

It's confusing, and Sephiroth’s brain still feels like—well, like an alien being had rampaged through it trying to rip apart his consciousness. Anyway, he’s not dead yet, and for all his confusion he has no intention of dying here. He needs to work through this. He needs time to work through this.

“I have no expectation of you believing me,” Valentine eventually says. He’s put the vials back into the cooler and taken out two bottles of water, which he sets next to the prepared meal that is still up against the bars. He takes out another bottle of water and a small vacuum-pack bag filled with a dark liquid, holding it in one hand as he shuts the cooler. Then he takes the cooler by its handle and stands up. “I carry the burden of proof, I know that. I’m printing out some of the research we’ve assembled over the years so you can read it—I can’t take a laptop down here. You deserve to know, even if we can’t let you out.”

Sephiroth snorts but tries not to signal his emotions more than that. Whatever his agenda is, Valentine seems more than willing to speak now and that’s a better environment for trying to find the truth than silence.

“I’m sorry.” Valentine looks at him again. When Sephiroth shrugs and merely looks back at him, Valentine seems to take it for the grudging truce it is, and genuinely seems as if that’s entirely acceptable to him.

He turns and takes a step and a half towards Vincent. Who had appeared to have sunk into a stupor, as far as Sephiroth can tell under the hair, but who suddenly, with shocking fluidity, rolls himself around the crate he’d been sitting up against and back into the shadowed corner.

Valentine inhales sharply but doesn’t look surprised. He only walks forward, sets down the bottle of water and the vacuum pack on the floor—just inside where the barrier spell runs, Sephiroth judges—and then backs off, leaving without another glance.

Sephiroth stays where he is for several minutes after the door closes. His head is still…he twists it gingerly from side to side, then puts his hand up to his temple, even though he understands that the damage is likely not physiological. He has no idea what kind of damage it might be, actually—for all his preternatural traits, he’s been working with an entirely human frame of reference, and for humans, extrasensory abilities aren’t supported by the evidence.

But then, he’s not entirely human. He—his mind skitters away from that, and he lets it, even though he knows he’ll have to work through the ramifications at some point. But there’s so much else, and on top of that his body now remembers it’s hungry and thirsty and there are food and water just a few feet away.

Except he doesn’t know what made her voice come back. It’s connected to Vincent and Chaos, but other than that he doesn’t know. And he doesn’t want her voice back. Whatever he is, he is not her and he will not be her, he will not give into her. If he’s managed so far to not give in to any of the others who’ve tried to crush him under their will, he damn well won’t do it to some alien pretending to be his mother, he thinks savagely.

“You’re not going to change,” Vincent suddenly says. He’s still hidden behind the crates, but seems to have enough awareness to chuckle dryly just as Sephiroth unthinkingly grasps at his bandaged arm. “Father was right about that. If you were going to, you would’ve already.”

And clearly, Sephiroth will have to accustom himself to revelations. His mind’s eye brings up Dr. Valentine’s face and then the flashes of Vincent’s he’s had so far. He grimaces, thinking he should have guessed that one, and that burst of irritation is enough to break his newfound paranoia. He needs to eat and drink.

Sephiroth tests each of his legs by rocking some weight onto his feet. When they seem to hold, he works off the wall and onto his knees, and shuffles over to the food and water.

“He said you looked into him,” Vincent says. His tone is a little heightened, not exactly from surprise. “I know it’s been years but they can’t have erased all of me.”

“He’s on record as having one child, a son, but no dependents and no record of them living anywhere near him,” Sephiroth mutters. It’s much easier to go back through everything he’d memorized for this trip than to try and order all the newer information…his head still feels as if it might go to mush if he tips it too violently. He tugs the water bottle through the bars and twists off its cap, then lifts it between his wrists to his mouth for a long, welcome swallow. “Everything was happening in Corel. I didn’t see the relevance of looking outside of it.”

“Fair.” Vincent sounds louder. When Sephiroth looks up, the man is—Vincent’s brows twitch as Sephiroth jerks in place, but then ignores Sephiroth as he, fully in view, bends over his bottle and vacuum-pack bag. “Everything with me happened up in Nibelheim.”

“Nibel—where he said this Lucre—where she—” Sephiroth’s tongue and lips stumble over very simple words, despite the fresh moisture from his drink. He knows what he wants to say, he thinks, but then what Valentine—Dr. Valentine—he doesn’t even know now who his thoughts mean, because if Vincent is his son then Vincent is Valentine too and that is too damned close to feeling like her.

He almost throws the bottle from him in frustration. He stops himself because that would be deeply counterproductive, and he is not—he is trained and he has trained himself to do better, damn it. He is not going to lose to this. He is not. He will not.

“I met her.” Vincent has pulled himself into a cross-legged sitting position. He puts the bottle of water to the side and picks up the bag instead, holding it by one side as he uses his other hand to massage its contents. He doesn’t seem to have any bullet wounds now, although his skin is still smeared with blood. “I knew her. She had you and then she got me out from where Hojo had me and then I killed her. Lucrecia. She asked me to do it, so I did.”

Sephiroth jerks again, though he’s already looking at Vincent. Who doesn’t look away from the bag as he lifts it towards his face with both hands.

“What Father said about Chaos and Jenova, he’s right. I can’t help it, Chaos can’t help it. Pla…placental crossing—she had Jenova traces in her from carrying you, and he didn’t—Hojo didn’t bother proofing her against it. She was dying and knew it but I did kill her.” Vincent’s voice is low and hoarse and dead. He doesn’t look up as he tilts the bag in his hands. “It’s a six-hour dose schedule. When it wears off, Chaos comes out and wants to do nothing but tear at you, and she knows that—she knows you’re one of hers and will try to keep you whole.”

“The bullets,” Sephiroth says, after a moment of trying to parse out which ‘she’ Vincent means when.

“That cage is big enough, if you stay on the far side Chaos can’t reach you. And it can’t break the bars. I had to stay in there when Father was working up the drug, so we’re sure about that,” Vincent says.

Then his hands jerk upwards. His head moves up and back as well, instinctively trying to flick his hair out of the way, so Sephiroth has an imperfect view at how Vincent bites into the bag. It’s still good enough for him to see the elongated canines, and anyway, it’s his sense of smell, not his eyesight, that tells him the bag’s contents are blood.

Sephiroth considers his position, then reaches through the bars for the prepared meal. Once he has that, he retreats to the farthest corner of the cell from Vincent, but he continues to watch the other man.

When Vincent is done, he lowers the bag to his lap and sits in silence for a few seconds. Then his hand moves up and makes wiping motions around his mouth. He lowers it and half-twists, retrieving the bottle of water and taking it and the bag over to the wall, partly behind the stacked crates. The bag disappears, but Sephiroth glimpses the end of the bottle being tilted up, with the occasional flicked spray, so Vincent is using that to rinse off himself rather than to drink. This also draws Sephiroth’s attention to a drain in the floor near that side of the room.

The splashing stops and Vincent moves around a little, then goes silent. While the crates do conceal him completely, they don’t cover that much space and Vincent can’t have much more than a folded-up blanket back there, if he has anything at all…if he’d known Lucrecia Crescent at the time of Sephiroth’s birth, then it’s been decades, not just years.

Considering that, he’s saner company than Sephiroth should expect. But still on that side of the bars, whatever warnings he sees fit to issue. Sephiroth opens up the food and starts to eat, forcing himself to pace out each bite and swallow. And then…he makes himself think.

Chapter 6: Past

Valentine comes back a few hours later, bringing more supplies with him. These include a blanket, a bucket for Sephiroth to relieve himself into, more food and water and also electrolyte and vitamin tablets to dissolve into the water. Valentine goes out of the room for a few minutes to allow Sephiroth some privacy with the bucket, and when he comes back, he offers up a Cure Potion and a thick stack of files.

“Curaga worked on you, but it also seemed to be enabling Jenova to make inroads, judging from how Chaos was reacting,” Valentine says. “You stabilized rapidly enough that I thought your own healing would carry you the rest of the way.”

Sephiroth weighs up the uncapped Cure Potion in his hand. “And now that I’m caged and your son is over there, you think it’s worth risking the experiment?”

The other man winces, but also continues setting out items on the floor on his side of the bars. His feelings may be genuine but he’s well-practiced at operating in spite of them. “I don’t want you to suffer unnecessarily, but I’m also not…I’m outside of my area here, except for expediency. Everything I’ve learned about Jenova and about Hojo’s research with her comes directly from trying to help Vincent cope.”

Nothing from that corner. Vincent hasn’t come out for any bodily needs since he and Sephiroth had last spoken, not even for movements solely to prevent cramping. He at least needs his medicine and nutrients in the form of blood, but what other physiological modifications he has, he’s clearly not in the mood to demonstrate them.

“You can keep that,” Valentine says, putting the cap down. “I won’t make you drink it.”

He doesn’t put it close enough to the bars for Sephiroth to reach for it. Instead he uses one of the folders to push it the rest of the way; he’d been standing nearer the last time he’d come, but this time he’s obviously noted Sephiroth’s ability to stand on his own when using the bucket and is being more cautious.

Which had been a bit of a wasteful display on Sephiroth’s part, he thinks as he looks at the bottle. It had cost him a good deal, and even if his healing is still working, he’s already aware that something about it is not as it should be. And if Jenova decides to invade his head again…but on the other hand, he thinks, he won’t defeat her by avoiding her.

“I’m told this has been field-tested,” Sephiroth remarks, looking over at the bars to the side. When Valentine also looks that way, Sephiroth quickly tips the bottle up against his mouth and downs it in one swallow.

He drops the emptied bottle against his knee, then lets that slip between his legs as he catches at the nearest bar with his hand. He’s a little dizzy now, but thinks—hopes—that that’s merely an artifact of his arm moving sharply up and down. He’d used the injured one and any movement more strenuous than a finger twitch seems to trigger a fresh set of throbbing.

The wash of Cure Potion through him blankets the pain in his arm but doesn’t completely smother it. As for the rest of him, he does immediately feel better, but it doesn’t come with that zinging, almost euphoric wave he’s accustomed to, and usually he’s not drinking undiluted Cure Potion because of his enhanced healing.

“Sephiroth?” asks Valentine.

“Yes?” Sephiroth says without thinking. Then he hears Valentine’s relieved exhale and twists to look at the other man.

“You aren’t showing the—here.” Valentine pulls a few sheets out of one of the folders and lays them on top, revealing what appear to be freeze-frames from black-and-white security footage. The resolution isn’t all that it could be, but even so, the half-transformed nature of the person in frame is obvious. “Henderson. The way that his skin is splitting along his limbs—”

“Different from your son’s,” Sephiroth notes, and not without intentional barbs.

Their hooks don’t skate harmlessly by, from the way Valentine’s expression grows more morose, but he doesn’t comment on them. “They all do that. When I saw you, I could see your eyes change, and you had…a kind of change in circulation…” Valentine draws three fingers along his forearm in wavy motions “…but the skin didn’t split and I don’t think I saw any signs of musculoskeletal changes either.”

Sephiroth presses his lips together. Part of him hates to even take the information, doled out as it is like charity. But the majority of him is one, well-accustomed to this position, and two, well-aware that mindless backlash has never gotten him any of his hard-earned freedoms. And he does want to know. “I didn’t hear anything just now either,” he allows. “I haven’t at all for the last few hours, although it’s hard to determine just when your son’s next dose—”

Valentine blinks and shakes his head at himself, and then produces a wristwatch to slide over the floor to Sephiroth. It’s not new, and the band has wear consistent with regular use. It also doesn’t tell anything else but the hour, minute, and second, and that’s only assuming that Valentine synced it with the actual time of day.

But Sephiroth takes it, and marks the exact time he does so before he pushes it aside. “Change in circulation.”

“The blood vessels stand out.” Valentine hesitates. “There’s a color change.”

Sephiroth absorbs that. Then finally does what he’s been contemplating on and off during these last few hours, his mind jumping from Valentine’s claims to his own research and suspicions and then finally all the stubborn fears he’s tried all his life to uproot.

He tears off the bandage on his arm. Predictably, Valentine flinches and moves back, but aside from putting one hand on the ground for balance, he stops there. Doesn’t reach for one of his holstered guns or out to stop Sephiroth either, as Sephiroth looks down.

The skin has knitted over, but—Sephiroth isn’t used to scarring. He’s seen it on others, of course, but on himself…it’s alien, is the first word that comes to mind. Which makes his lip curl and almost brings his finger up to press hard against the rough, uneven ridges all on its own.

It still hurts. Most of all in the very center of the two gashes Vincent’s canines had left, but the halo of aching spreads far beyond the scarring itself to move well up into Sephiroth’s shoulder. He opens and closes his fingers a few times, turning his arm as he does to study the muscle movement: some of them are not as fluid as they could be, but not to the point that it’d reduce mobility on its own. But…yes, he sees it too, what Valentine had described. Grey shadows that start at the edges of the scarred lines and then feather out as they darken, and as they darken, the pain also starts to edge into Sephiroth’s head.

He jerks his chin up and his arm against his chest, then strains his—but he doesn’t hear her. He doesn’t hear her.

“That isn’t a trace of Jenova, it’s a—it’s a remnant of Chaos,” Valentine says. Speaking more quietly now, almost as if he’s trying to comfort Sephiroth. “Since they’re antithetical to each other and you have her traits integrated all through you—”

“How are you deducing that?” Sephiroth snaps. “I thought the others died immediately—did they—”

“Yes. Yes, they did. Their minds were already gone, killing their bodies was the only way we had left to free them,” Valentine says. He’s pulling more sheets out of the folders and ordering them without looking as he speaks. “I didn’t learn to recognize that trace from them, I learned it from—my accident you’ve read about, it involved Chaos. I wasn’t able to purge all of the traces from myself afterward and I sometimes see that myself. It’s always grey or black, and what I saw with you before Vincent bit down was green. That was Jenova, the green.”

Sephiroth exhales slowly. Vincent’s transformation hadn’t looked like the freeze-frames. With him, it’d looked as if one form was melting into the other; painful as it’d obviously been, it had seemed to allow for a certain coexistence and hadn’t involved one form literally ripping out from another. And while Sephiroth has no reference for what the man used to be like, Vincent at least seems to have the personality of a person rather than that of an eons-old entity. As hard as it is for Sephiroth to accept the presence of another…contaminant in himself, Chaos is clearly the lesser evil.

Still, prioritization only being expedient, and he’s certainly not ready to reconcile himself to any of this. “Then I can neither confirm nor deny without inviting her into my head, and at that point she’s the only one who would see it. Unless you had cameras I missed in that tunnel.”

“No, but there is this,” Valentine says.

He pushes the papers over to Sephiroth, who takes pains not to signal any sort of gratitude but who does take them. And then reads them, eventually pushing himself up against the bars so that his weak body won’t drag his eyes away from the papers. When he’s done, Valentine hands him another batch, and then another.

They aren’t simply a manifesto of the other man’s as Sephiroth had been half-expecting, but a collation of multiple sources. Of course Valentine could have faked all of it, and does have the knowledge and the means to faithfully replicate R&D reports in a style and format that Sephiroth knows few others would be familiar with these days. But the amount of fakery it would have taken…and then Valentine starts handing him photocopies of materials in Hojo’s actual handwriting and that is unmistakable to Sephiroth. The spidery near-illegibility, the idiosyncratic abbreviations, it’s all as grimly authentic as the feeling in Sephiroth when he realizes he’s reading an alternative version of one particular document he has in his own possession, without the redactions that he’s been puzzling over for years.

Everything backs up what Valentine says, and then offers additional details on top of it—additional details from additional contemporary points of view. Hojo’s handwriting is on some papers, but there’s another person’s notes as well, and then Valentine hands him a sheet consisting solely of this person’s writing, including the signature at the bottom of the observation section: L. Crescent.

His purported mother, these are—Sephiroth scrambles back through the pages he's already read, looking again at her annotations. And then, slowly, he works back to where he’d left off, now understanding where she’s taken up the pen. Taken the self-serving, monomaniacal story Hojo has fed him all his life and smashed it to pieces, to offer him up real facts.

Across so much time, his mother is telling him what truly happened. Sephiroth reads and reads till he thinks he has more or less the entire timeline from when Lucrecia Crescent joined Hojo’s lab and was assigned to the Jenova Project—somehow entangling Vincent when he was detailed to it as well—and then to her death here in Corel, after she and Vincent had escaped Nibelheim without Sephiroth. And that alone could have been enough for him before—merely having her writing would have been enough.

But not now. Not with all these new thoughts—he’d been shying from them just hours ago, but with so much information in her words suddenly in his grasp, his mind is racing, forming theories, looking for proofs or disproofs, finding more questions…what had she and Hojo actually done with those Jenova samples? What had she known that Hojo had never, ever let Sephiroth learn?

Valentine had risen at some point, but Sephiroth hadn’t paid much attention—he has nearly all of the papers on his side now and is far too busy cross-referencing between sources and backtracking to reread damning paragraphs, ones labeled as written by his own mother. Lucrecia had adhered to her training even in her last days—had shown a kind of courage and endurance utterly absent from Hojo’s taunting references to her—and had documented as much as she could, both of Hojo’s research and of her own symptoms. She’d been trying to analyze the effects of Jenova on herself, with the stated goal of leaving records for her son, Sephiroth.

She’d named him that. He had wondered, and had eventually decided that even if Hojo in an uncharacteristic moment of fancy had granted him the name, he was claiming it for himself and would be the one to dictate its meaning to the rest of the world. But…she’d chosen it for him. It’s only a short, three-word sentence in a report bursting with far more that Sephiroth should be paying attention to, but he lingers over this one.

To the point that when Vincent snarls, it catches him entirely off-guard. His hands jerk up towards defensive positions, but then he feels the paper start to tear—he’d forgotten he was still holding it. He lets go to preserve it but then grabs the sheet back with one hand as he pivots himself.

Valentine is still present, but has gone over to stand just behind the re-raised barrier spell. He has his hand to his pistol—the barrier is clearly keyed to one of the materia set in it—but his expression is far more concerned for the man squatting before him than for his own safety. “I—”

“Enough.” Vincent is on his hands and knees but turned sideways to Valentine, as if he’d been caught heading back to his corner. He’s huddled over something and his elbows move as he manipulates it, and then Sephiroth hears faint sucking noises. A drained vacuum-pack bag drops from under Vincent’s hair, slides off his knee, and then skitters across the floor, just behind the dissolving barrier spell, as Vincent suddenly springs behind the crates. “There. Happy?”

Far from it, says the slow, despairing way that Valentine kneels down and picks up the bag. The other man stays in that position for a second, fingering the punctured top. Then he reaches out. He picks up another, still-full bag that Sephiroth hadn’t seen before because it’d been on Vincent’s other side, and then carefully turns it so now a label on it is facing upwards. Then he looks over at Vincent, whose harsh breathing is audible but who otherwise provides no other reaction.

Valentine folds up the empty bag in one hand, still looking at his son. Then he gets to his feet. He gives Vincent another look, then turns to Sephiroth.

“Do you have any questions?” Valentine asks.

Judging by his tone, even vitriol would be welcome, possibly more so than polite engagement. The man has a strong sense of determination but seems to have an equally strong desire to be punished for it, Sephiroth thinks.

Playing to either is not particularly appealing to Sephiroth, so he simply shakes his head. Though to ensure that he doesn’t come off as completely recalcitrant, he does pluck up the papers from where they’ve scattered around him and makes as if he’s more concerned about resuming his reading. He guesses that should do to keep Valentine providing information, and receives confirmation when the man promises to be back with more.

Sephiroth allows a quick glance upward at Valentine, as if he’s barely restraining his curiosity. He does want whatever else Valentine has, but pretending to be less controlled about it is both a sop to his pride and one step towards an opportunity to make Valentine make a mistake.

Valentine looks slightly less despairing when he leaves. Not happy, but as if he still has direction and purpose, and a man with those is a man unlikely to just leave Sephiroth down here. Granted, he’s been tending to Vincent for the better part of two decades, but—that reminds Sephiroth and he checks the time on the watch.

“It’s another ninety minutes,” Vincent says.

Not to Valentine’s next visit, even though that had been why Sephiroth was timing it, so he could start working out the man’s schedule. “To your next attack,” Sephiroth says.

“I’m not going to attack you now.” Vincent shifts so that his head is visible above the tops of the crates, but then seems reluctant to come any further out from his corner. “He actually gave me my damned—he doesn’t shoot me every six hours.”

“Frankly, I wouldn’t have been able to guess that,” Sephiroth says, and then raises his brows when Vincent lets out a sharp, bitter, but undeniable laugh. “He withheld it from you to make a point to me? Does he do that often?”

Vincent laughs again and drops back behind the crates. Just before that, his eyes had gone to the packet of blood and the other item his father had left for him, but he doesn’t seem to want that nearly as much as he wants to spar with Sephiroth. “I know what you’re trying for. I don’t have to be here for him to find me, Sephiroth. I’m only here because if you get out, I’m probably the only one who can stop you.”

That had occurred to Sephiroth, but now that Vincent says it aloud, he sees all the things wrong with that assumption. “That may be true, but you chose not to do it before. I’m not dead, after all, and if your father had to use three shots, then you had more than enough time before he intervened before.”

“I’m not a saint.” Vincent’s voice shivers into an impossibly low bass and Sephiroth can’t help looking again at how the shadows in his corner defy the positioning of the lights.

“Exactly. And your father’s not a geneticist, but somehow he worked out something to suppress your changes…and now he thinks he can unravel everything Hojo’s put into me,” Sephiroth says. He thinks he sees the shadows move and deliberately snaps the papers in his hand. “Oh, I’m reading, I’m not ignoring what he’s been telling me. And I wasn’t any fan of Hojo’s before this, but Hojo is a geneticist. You can debate what he did but you can’t debate that it involved that.”

The shadow actually hasn’t moved. For a moment fear spikes in Sephiroth and he strains his eyes, afraid that his vision is doubling again and afraid that it’s a sign of a mental invasion, but then he realizes the truth: he’s the one who is moving and not Vincent. He’s trembling from hunger, and a Cure Potion won’t address that.

Vincent doesn’t reply, so Sephiroth puts aside the papers for now and crawls back to retrieve the new meal. The portions are adequate in volume but probably not calorically dense enough, especially with how his healing factor has been taxed lately. He might have to mention this to Valentine—he hates giving up potential leverage like that, but he’ll rapidly deteriorate otherwise, and Valentine might take too long to work it out himself, since Vincent somehow ia able to sustain himself on a pint of blood at a time.

“The drug is in the blood,” Sephiroth surmises, continuing to follow that line of thought. He settles back on his pad, his blanket thrown over his lap—the room is not nearly as chilly as it should be, which may also be due to Vincent/Chaos, but he’s still shivering and that also is burning calories—and works out a few more assumptions. “You have it every six hours. He shorted you, and when he does that, you can’t control Chaos so Chaos wants to attack me, and that in turn brings out Jenova…but that makes no sense. Jenova was in my head when you bit me. Why would she wait to try taking my body again till you throw a fit?”

Sephiroth’s stomach abruptly cramps. He bites back a hiss and makes himself chew his next bite more slowly, to not lose himself so much in his musings that he participates in degrading his own health. Which is very close to something his mother had written, he suddenly thinks—and yes, Lucrecia is his mother. He decides that then and there, because anything that wants to destroy his mind cannot be his mother and he always knew Hojo only told him what served Hojo, not what was the truth—and because she sounds like him. He’s read her notes and they sound like what he would write, if he were in her position, and he wants someone like that to be his mother.

He eats another bite, then balances what remains of the meal packet on one leg as he picks up the nearest pile of papers. She’d written about scarring, about watching her body slowly refuse to obey her mind, about the day when she might look over her sentences and not remember writing them at all…and then she’d written that, while she couldn’t help being frightened, she did take some comfort in that her words would prove her existence long after she stopped knowing it herself. He can honor that—he can better that, he thinks. He’ll remember her.

“Chaos doesn’t call out to her. They only respond when she’s near,” Vincent mutters.

Barely audible. Sephiroth immediately stops chewing so as not to obscure any more comments from the other man, but as the seconds drag on and nothing follows, he can’t help an impatient noise. “Useful. If I wasn’t already certain your father was twisting things like every R&D—”

“Father’s trying,” Vincent snaps, but the palpable frustration behind it belies his words. The shadows over his corner ripple, and then Sephiroth glimpses the top of his head. “You’re quick, you can tell yourself. I don’t need to.”

“Tell yourself that, it should make guard duty feel like an honor,” Sephiroth snorts.

He flips over his current sheet, then turns it back and finally spots where he’d left off. Then he squints as the words seem to move on their own. They resolve, but jump again, and he has to admit to himself that he’s in need of sleep too, uneasy as that will be in his current situation. He’s read nearly everything that Valentine brought, though he was admittedly gobbling and not stopping to parse every detail. He needs to reread it again to be certain he hasn’t missed a critical detail, and his eyes try to scan that line once more, even as he starts to move the paper to the floor.

“I didn’t want to kill you.” Vincent says it in the tone of a resentful child, inclusive of the background wonder at the mere discovery of such a thing as shame. “Didn’t care about the others, they were shells, even I could see that—see the nothing in there, behind her, but you still had something in your eyes. Chaos could even see that. But you were standing right on it and she wasn’t going to get out of you any other—”

Sephiroth looks up. “On it?”

Vincent falls silent again. It’s so difficult to tell the man is even there at times. The room is not so large that Sephiroth should lose track of the man’s breathing or heartbeat, and yet, somehow, he does. And then suddenly Vincent’s presence will snap out at him, like now, when he can distinctly hear the man turn roughly over and wrestle with himself and breathe as if bearing up under a heavy load.

Something about it communicates an internal struggle, not an external reaction, and Vincent’s words just now had more of the quality of a rant than a reply. He might only be talking to himself, a common enough habit among the mentally-troubled and prisoners held in solitary confinement, both categories Vincent seems to inhabit. Sephiroth moves his finger across the sheet he’d been reading, halfway to dismissing the man again, and Vincent suddenly lets out a snarl of such agonized rawness that Sephiroth tightens his arms across himself in instinctive protection.

Slowly, the sound fades. Vincent coughs, a much weaker, hollower sound, and then he speaks. “Father tries to tell the truth when he can. He’d rather save people than kill them.”

Wary as Sephiroth still is, he has to take a moment to swallow back his irritation. He’s trapped here, regardless of Valentine’s intentions, and even if the man ultimately ends up savior of the world, Sephiroth will not forget that. But…he needs more information, one way or the other, and currently what he can do is talk. “Do you agree?”

That spurs a hoarse laugh from Vincent. “They left out that I was a Turk, didn’t they?”

Sephiroth makes a frustrated noise before he can help himself, then calms down. He had a list of names before this, and he’ll still have one after this—and every one of the names on it will be addressed before he dies, he’ll swear to that. “Yes.”

“I can kill, that’s not the problem—Father’s going to tell you the truth he knows,” Vincent says. “And then she’s going to tell you it doesn’t actually matter, because at the end of the day, we all die.”

“Then they’re both lying one way or the other. I don’t—you’ve been sitting down here with the time on your hands to think about it and you seem to have missed the point, when I can see it already,” Sephiroth snaps. “You decided I wasn’t going to die by your hands, so something matters about that. And if it wasn’t because I was turning into a damned alien—puppet—”

“You aren’t but she’s still in you,” Vincent snaps back. “You’re just not standing in the damned stuff anymore, but it was getting into you and if you were fighting—I didn’t see how to get it out except to drink it out of you.”

“What was it?” Sephiroth demands.

But his words fall into a dead silence. Vincent has shielded himself again, and even his companion shadows seem to have retracted a little under Sephiroth’s glare. There’s the near-empty food packet, or even the waste bucket, both easy ways to test the other man’s obstinance.

It’s a satisfying thought, but only a thought. Making a mess is only fouling the space for Sephiroth as well, and as difficult as Vincent and his father’s relationship obviously is, they still clearly put effort into defending each other. Petty vengeance isn’t going to advance anything except for Sephiroth’s continued humiliation, and that is unproductive.

Besides…he has his mother’s papers now. She had briefly mentioned Vincent and Dr. Valentine, although Sephiroth couldn’t gather very much besides her feelings of guilt about both of them and incidents she hadn’t described. But he has a little idea of what those incidents were now, and he might be able to glean more. So shaking back his exhaustion, he shuffles through them to look for those passages.

Notes:

I have been trying to write a vampire Vincent story for years, and every time he comes out...not really a vampire. Yes, he does drink blood, but this isn't going to the usual vampire storylines.

Sephiroth coming off a war where he lost two close friends explains a little bit of why he decided to trust the contents of Nibelheim's basement even though all the records were Hojo's and he has absolutely no reason to trust Hojo on anything and all the reasons to believe exactly the opposite of what Hojo says. But it did make me think that him learning the truth from a different source should matter. And science is about documenting everything (history is about editing in/out this or that view), so Lucrecia would have generated her own records, and in this universe Hojo didn't get to airbrush out her contributions.

Chapter 7: Present

What with last-minute this and that and then an overturned truck on the freeway, Zack barely has time to spot Cloud’s hair in the airport terminal and then run up to it and onto the plane before it takes off. Granted, it’s a charter and wasn’t actually going to leave without him, but all the eyes on him coming in make him feel the close call.

Cissnei’s there, but she excuses herself after greeting Zack to go turn in, since it’s close to midnight and thanks to the time difference, they’re going to land midday in Corel. Cloud keeps Zack company a little longer, but he’s looking pretty bushed too and so once they’ve gotten through the priority work items, Zack tells him to get some sleep.

“What about you?” Cloud asks, looking a little suspiciously at the tablet balanced at Zack’s elbow. “You can’t log into anything higher than confidential level till we land, Zack.”

“Yeah, I know, but since you helpfully downloaded all these files, it’s not like I even need the cloud, Cloud,” Zack says with his most winning smile.

Cloud only looks more suspicious. “I just told you I didn’t turn up anything. They have to actually ship the boxes from the warehouse before they can pull those files, and that’s not going to happen until after we land.”

This is the kind of thing Zack would do all the time to Angeal when he first got detailed to the other man, because Angeal is a dedicated officer and a shitty liar when it comes to his own workaholic habits, and Zack regrets now that he’d taught all his tricks to Cloud. “Okay, fine, you caught me. I’m just trying to cram before we touch down, because honestly, between Procurement and getting Hendriksen up to speed about how we’re keeping Palmer out of Troy’s disciplinary hearing and Gen’s laundry, I had no time to even check the meeting schedule. And Cissnei’s gonna nail us on that kind of thing, Spike.”

“We have to wake up forty minutes before landing anyway, you can read it all then and you’ll actually remember it that way,” Cloud says patiently. “You never remember anything you read right before you fall asleep.”

Zack really did a good job with Cloud, and it is terrible. “C’mon, Spike, I know how bad landings are for you. Who’s gonna hold your hair back in the bathroom for you if I’m memorizing bullet points?”

“Cissnei,” Cloud says dryly.

Then he stares at Zack till Zack sighs and puts the tablet away, and comes with Cloud to the back half of the plane where there are built-in bunks. They’re not great beds, and definitely not sized for Zack—one time when he’s envious of Cloud—but he manages to flop in one and once he’s horizontal, he’s out within a couple minutes.

Best way to travel, especially when it’s a work trip to somewhere not really fun, and unlike Cloud who has to dose himself with some off-the-books stuff to get past the motion sickness, Zack usually has no trouble with it. But though he falls asleep without any problems, he ends up waking a couple hours later and then can’t get back to sleep.

He tries. He goes to the bathroom, then sits in the cabin area for half an hour checking his email and then, when he realizes that that’s just got him obsessively refreshing searches for news about Wutai, tries prepopulating his expense report for this trip. But none of that works either, and he’s thinking about just going back to his bunk and staring at the ceiling when Cissnei wanders out.

She pauses when she sees him. He thinks about annoying her away from him for a second, then decides that that’s just him being both sleep-deprived and antsy. Sure, he doesn’t believe for a second that she’s just here to look into her own objectives—standing Turk objective numero uno is spying on the rest of the company, after all—but that’s not specifically her fault. She’s got a boss just like he does, and since they’re out of Midgar and Zack isn’t actually saying this aloud to anyone…he’s maybe just the tiniest bit frustrated with Angeal right now.

“Was gonna head on back,” Zack says to her.

He puts his hand on the seat arm to start getting up, but pauses as Cissnei raises her hand. She looks a little unsure for a moment, but then firms up and shakes her head. “It’s fine, I’m not about to open a line back to Tseng or anything,” she says. “I just wanted a cup of coffee.”

Zack blinks, then checks the time on his tablet. “You sure? We’ve got a whole four hours to go.”

Cissnei twitches as if she hadn’t known that, but then doubles down and goes over to the refreshments area. There’s still half a pot of coffee locked into the machine, but she dumps that out and then starts rummaging through the pantry cabinet. “Well, it’s not like sleep is working at this point, I might as well just start caffeine-loading for when we land,” she mutters.

To be honest, Zack agrees with that, and after a moment he gets up and goes over to help her. He rinses out the pot while she’s tamping grinds into the machine, and then they both sit back to wait for it to drip.

It gets a little awkward. Not that Zack is anxious to be social around a Turk, but he’s already twiddling his thumbs here while the bulk of SOLDIER goes off to fight a war and his boss tries not to let them be labeled lab-engineered monsters while they’re at it, and he can’t talk to anyone about it. He could actually message back to Midgar, but they’re all going to be asleep except for the exact people who sent him out here to…not get him out of the way so they can solve the real problem. At least, he hopes not.

“You ever meet any of the Corel managers before?” Cissnei suddenly asks.

“No,” Zack says without thinking. Then he twists away from her, messing with his hair to cover up his grimace. “You?”

Cissnei doesn’t immediately answer. But when he straightens back up, she’s not looking at him like she’s lording over scoring a point, or like she’s settling into an interrogation. She just looks…uncomfortable. That and tired, and maybe like she had about as much advance notice about this as Zack, even though she did the initial briefing on Corel for them.

“Look,” she starts, drawing out the word like she’s still half-thinking about saying it. “You’re probably thinking I’m going after one of them. I can’t hand over my mission brief to you, but this isn’t an assassination.”

“Well, good to know,” Zack says. Then he feels a little bad. Not because she’s looking at him with puppy eyes—she’s not, she’s actually turned to check on the coffee—but because she sounds so resigned to the fact that he’s not going to believe her. “Anything else?”

The coffee’s ready so he gets up as he says that. Cissnei turns and gives him a kind of odd look, and at first he thinks it might be because he’s grabbing all the mugs. It’s just to check their bottoms and then hand her the first dust-free one he finds, and when he does that, she thanks him but she also keeps giving him that look. But it’s not till they’re stirring in the milk and sugar that she says anything else.

“We gave you all the documentation we have. Just stripped out the informant names, that kind of thing, but all the photos and film and…you’re not even a little freaked out?” Cissnei asks. Looking into her coffee, her brows pinched together, voice a little lower than before.

“Nah, I go ghost-hunting all the time. Sector Three, there’s this bar—cute bartender, great rotating tap and way back in the frontier days it hosted a shootout between rival gangs. Sometimes you still hear ‘em in the bathroom,” Zack says. He flicks his stirrer into the waste bag and picks up his mug for a taste, then looks at her. Then blinks. “Wait, so…you all think it really is a ghost? Not just an out-of-place Hungry?”

Cissnei makes a face at him. “Zack, Hungries are native to Corel.”

“Really? I thought they were more of a Bone Village thing,” Zack says, drinking more of his coffee. Now that he’s got it, he has to admit his brain was getting pretty fuzzy there and the world is always better in better definition. “I was watching this nature documentary the other night, and I didn’t know this but Hungries actually lay eggs. Not hard-shelled though, they’re kind of gooshy and when they hatch, the itty-bitty ones sort of toothpaste themselves out of there and then snap back into shape. It’s cool, in a gross way.”

At first Cissnei looks like she’s going to interrupt, but then she lets him run on with an increasingly bemused expression on her face. It doesn’t veer as deep into irritation as most people’s do, and when he finishes, she actually smiles, even if it’s only for a second. “It’s not a ghost. If it was just a ghost, I don’t think Hewley would be sending you.”

“Appreciate the vote of confidence,” Zack says, but he does catch himself a little bit. That reminds him that there’s a bunch of politics swirling around here, and even if she’s giving him a compliment, he still has to be careful.

She must pick up on that because she purses her lips like she wishes she hadn’t said that and then, kind of abruptly, goes for the supply of tea cookies. “The footage analysis says it’s not a ghost. They’re pretty sure something was really there, it’s not just an artifact, and if it was there and could get picked up on film, then it’s solid enough to bounce light,” she says as she points a cookie at him. “If it’s that solid and it looks like an actual guy walking around after these people died—you saw the morgue photos.”

“Yeah. Yeah, and those were gruesome,” Zack acknowledges. This is safer ground, he decides. They’re just talking about the evidence they both have, and they do have to run an investigation. All the politics comes up after that, when their reports go to their respective bosses, but so long as he keeps that in mind, it is a little bit of a relief to talk to someone besides Cloud, who, awesome as he is, tends not to give his opinion if he can instead run another search query. “But to be honest, they didn’t look like a person did it. At least, not if the person thought they were a person—I guess you can’t rule out yet that they were mentally unstable and thought they were a dire wolf or something like that.”

“Dire wolves are from Nibelheim. There’s a good documentary on that, except for the lack of eggs,” Cissnei deadpans. For some reason her brows twitch at Zack’s laugh, but overall she seems to be relaxing. “Agreed, it would’ve been easy to say it was a monster attack if these deaths hadn’t all happened indoors, and if this footage wasn’t so…weird. And it’s a little strange for someone to stay that long after killing, if it is a person. You saw the timestamps, right?”

Zack had, but he hadn’t really thought that much about it till Cissnei brings it up. There are SOLDIER teams that do more domestic public-safety work and who get schooled in this kind of forensics, and some of them report to Angeal so Zack occasionally gets to read their write-ups. But Zack himself doesn’t really cover that area, especially since things started heating up with Wutai again. Since Genesis has been leading in that theater, he hasn’t been out to the frontlines except to shadow Angeal on a couple brief inspections, but he’d always had the idea Angeal was training him up for that and not for this kind of thing.

Which maybe is why he keeps having this feeling he’s not seeing around all the corners. There’s the politics, and everybody getting more and more stressed out, but also he just doesn’t quite know what he’s doing here, aside from being Angeal’s boots on the ground.

Cissnei seems a lot more comfortable with it, for all that she’s not sleeping over something. “It’s kind of off for most serial killer profiles,” she adds, unwrapping her cookie. “They’re gonna want to watch, but not hanging around in the victim’s place like that. That is so ballsy it’s a deformity, to quote Reno.”

“You want one of these after that?” Zack says, holding up a wet wipe packet.

Her lips quirk towards a smile even as she lightly smacks down his offering. “He’s a colleague, Zack.”

“Yeah, well, so are you till we figure this out,” Zack says.

Cissnei blinks and then looks down at the cookie in her hand. She’s holding its wrapper in her other hand and she drops that in the trash, then rubs off the crumbs from her fingers. “You looked into this Sephiroth, right?”

“We’re working on that,” Zack says, thinking he should be cautious again. Though what they’ve found so far is technically in files that anyone can access, once they know what to look for, so he tries not to give too many opinions beyond that. “There is a SOLDIER file under that name, but it’s pretty old.”

“Look, I’m not—” Cissnei exhales and then stops to think for a second, even lowering her cookie mid-bite “—this isn’t about Hewley and Rhapsodos’ leadership. They weren’t even in Midgar back then, we all know that. But you know who was, and who went to Corel with Sephiroth?”

Zack starts to say that as far as he’s read, Sephiroth went to Corel on his own, but then stops because that probably gives away what files he and Cloud haven’t gotten to. But he’s too obvious about it because that gives away that he’s worried about that, and that makes Cissnei get a little impatient with him.

“There’s a lot of gaps, Zack, is what I’m trying to say, and if it wasn’t obvious from me saying it, it wasn’t us who made those gaps. I talked to Tseng and I can tell you this much, he doesn’t know what happened there either,” she says. She takes an annoyed bite out of the cookie and follows it with a swig of coffee. “I really am supposed to figure that out, that’s part of my job.”

“Okay, okay, I’m not saying it isn’t. And listen, if we’re on the same page there, then I’m fine with it. This looks like some kind of fuck-up and if you’re not here to just pile more dirt on top of it, well, I’m always happy for another hand at shoveling,” Zack says. He digs into the bag and pulls out another cookie, then holds it out to her. “Split it with you. I’m not so proud as to pretend my dim SOLDIER brain doesn’t do better on sugar.”

Cissnei declines the cookie, but she seems to have calmed down. Even looks a little apologetic as she lifts her coffee. “You’d think by now they’d train you to carry better rations…even Rude’s always got some chocolate on him,” she says with a small, brief smile. “But anyway…Heidegger. Heidegger went with Sephiroth to Corel.”

Zack’s not exactly a great student of history, but helping Angeal keep up on endless inter-departmental feuds has made him learn a few things and he knows that Heidegger was kind of the head of SOLDIER at one point. Which just goes to show that some things are eternal and one of them is Shinra’s tendency to assign execs to areas they know jack shit about, because Zack has had enough run-ins with Heidegger to know that his grasp of basic tactics is pitiful. So is his grasp of personnel management, or honestly, plain good manners, and these days he and Public Security don’t so much as sneeze in SOLDIER’s direction without Genesis and Hollander both going at him, probably the only time Zack ever sees them team up.

But to come back to Cissnei’s point, Heidegger is actually still around, and if he personally knew this Sephiroth…“Wish somebody had told me that before we’d left Midgar,” Zack can’t help saying.

He doesn’t mean the Turks with that—at least, not just them, since there are at least two other departments who also could’ve said something and one of them is SOLDIER—but Cissnei gets a little blank-faced. Then she cracks that open and lets her irritation come through, and surprise, it’s not pointed at Zack.

“Yeah, I know,” Cissnei says. She pops the last of her cookie in her mouth, then glances at the bag. Then suddenly reaches over and has a second one, notwithstanding her rejection of Zack’s offer literally minutes before. “Tseng told me about two minutes before I got to the airport—someone did go to talk to Heidegger, but he gave Rude the run-around and then ducked out on Tseng. Now nobody’s sure where he is.”

“Is the Gold Saucer running a weekend promo?” Zack snorts.

Cissnei grimaces and he sobers. “I mean it, Zack. Nobody knows where he is. He stood Tseng up and by the time anyone realized he’d left the building—anyway, keep that in mind,” she says. “I’m hoping there’s an update before we land since Reno was checking passenger manifests.”

It takes a moment for Zack to follow. “…you think he’s going to Corel ahead of us? To dig up Sephiroth or something like that?”

“I told you, I don’t believe in ghosts,” Cissnei says. She doesn’t eat the second cookie, but just holds it in her hand as she finishes off her coffee. “One other thing, Zack. If it turns out Heidegger is in town, you know you can’t tell him to do anything without a signed order from the board.”

Because vile as the man is, he’s still a board-level director and technically that’s so far over Zack’s head he can’t do anything at all. Heidegger can’t order him around either, but that doesn’t mean that much when he has to sit on his hands and watch the man abuse others—he’d have to go to Angeal and he knows Angeal wouldn’t let it go, but Angeal also doesn’t need to give the board more reasons to give SOLDIER the stink-eye right now. The Turks, on the other hand, don’t ever seem to have this kind of problem.

So Cissnei is telling him that if someone’s going to take a shot at Heidegger, it’s going to be her and not him. Part of Zack wants to just raise his hands and tell her to go at it, but he can’t turn off his brain and he knows the Turks wouldn’t just take Heidegger, they’d take him away and keep anything they learn to themselves. And Angeal told Zack what his job was here: find out the truth and bring it back.

But this probably isn’t the time or place to pick an argument with Cissnei. She is giving him information, and up to the point where their mission objectives part, Zack has no problem with cooperating with her. “No need to quote the rulebook at me,” he says. “Anyway, thanks for letting me know—Cloud and I’ll keep an eye out too, and I’ll let Angeal know the Turks are on the case.”

Well, maybe a little poke, since he has SOLDIER’s reputation to uphold after all. Anyway, if she didn’t want Angeal to know—if Angeal and Tseng didn’t already have this talk—then she shouldn’t be telling him no matter how good the cookies and coffee are. Rulebook also says he’s got to report any inter-departmental conflict to his supervisor.

From the way Cissnei snorts, the poke is taken and she’s not going to retaliate with a gun, so that’s about as good as they can be. She excuses herself a moment later, saying she’s going to the bathroom. Zack secures what’s left of the coffee and tidies up the pantry, then heads to the back half of the plane.

When he pushes open the door, the lighted icon on the wall to his left says Cissnei’s still in the bathroom. He turns to his right and coughs lightly, thinking that if Cloud’s awake, he can catch the man up before she comes out.

But just as he does that, he realizes that the light just flicked off in Cloud’s bunk. A second later, Cloud sticks his head past the black-out curtain. “Hey, Spike, interrupting something?” Zack asks.

Just to ask but Cloud’s face suddenly lights up like a fireworks display. Cloud isn’t generally the kind of guy who shows when he’s embarrassed—which isn’t at all the same as being embarrassed and Zack is still annoyed at himself for taking so long to realize that—so this sends Zack’s brows arching. He’s been trying to get Cloud to have some kind of personal life for ages, and while he hasn’t given up hope there yet, he has been having to rethink his timeline.

“It’s cool, you need some me time, I can go back—” Zack starts, because if he doesn’t have to make this a five-year plan after all, he’s totally okay with that.

“No. No, it wasn’t—I wasn’t,” Cloud says. He pushes himself up on one arm and then pulls the curtain out of the way. In the process his other arm briefly swings out of the bed, and he’s holding his screen with that one in such a way that Zack gets a glimpse of the screen—not for spying purposes, just serendipitous views between friends. “What happened?”

“Hey, calm down, we’re still in flight and nobody’s calling for the parachutes yet,” Zack says. He didn’t see that much, just that the phone was still unlocked and Cloud was definitely in a non-official messaging app, and he makes a point of pretending his eyes didn’t even go there as Cloud pulls in that arm. “Cissnei and I just had some coffee chat. She’s gonna come out in a second so I’ll fill you in all the way later but add Heidegger to your Sephiroth research. He was around and involved, turns out.”

Cloud blinks once in surprise, but doesn’t ask any questions. He just nods and, seeing Zack reaching for the bunk ladder, rolls onto his back again. He’s got the bottom bunk, since even though his medication usually wipes out the motion sickness once they hit cruising, turbulence can trigger it again and he says that the bottom is easier on him for that. So when the bathroom door opens and his eyes go to that, Zack takes a quick peek down and spots Cloud’s phone, screen still unlocked, just sticking out from the blanket.

He still doesn’t get that much—doesn’t see any of the messages or if they have giveaway emojis, sadly—but he does get that Cloud is one nervous guy under that poker face, because the top of the screen where the other person’s name should be just says ‘Restricted.’ Zack shakes his head as he pulls himself into the top bunk and vows that when they get back to Midgar, he’s going to work more on Cloud and convince the guy that you can, in fact, have a decent and healthy social life while working at Shinra.

But first they have to get to Corel and find out who killed those three people, who this ‘Sephiroth’ really is, and why he’s just making everyone make bad decisions. And that, Zack thinks, as he looks at the bunk ceiling, definitely isn’t shaping up to be a solo mission.

Chapter 8: Present

The flight lands in Corel without any problem, and once they get through the mandatory meet-and-greets, the top local official wisely gets out of their way after ushering them down to the morgue. Technically, the top dog in Corel is Palmer, but Palmer also oversees Rocket Town and tries to stay either there or in Midgar as much as possible, so he delegates pretty much everything in Corel to the Chief Engineer. She clearly understands the seriousness of the situation, but also clearly wants to have as little involvement as possible with whatever it takes to resolve it.

“Side-stepping any blowback,” Cissnei remarks once they’re alone.

“Well, she’s got to live here,” Zack says.

Cissnei gives him a sharp look, then rolls her eyes. “Didn’t think SOLDIER taught people the art of forgiveness. But as long as she comes through with a guide for the mines, I guess that’s fine—I just don’t want to have go down there with just GPS and a satphone to figure out where the hell I am.”

“Did you download the latest maps?” Cloud asks her with a frown.

She starts to tell him those aren’t that accurate and Cloud, diligent miracle-worker that he is, patiently explains that he’s not referring to the public ones but to the ones SOLDIER regularly compiles for purposes of figuring out what might explode, collapse, or otherwise go down if Corel is attacked. Those rely on drone-operated tech like ground-penetrating radar rather than people so they’re not super-detailed, but frankly, Zack would check those first himself.

If he wasn’t bracing himself to go into the cold room, that is. He’s seen his fair share of dead bodies, but just from the photos, he knows this is going to be bad.

It has to be done, and it’s the first step to getting to the bottom of this and stopping it before more people get hurt. He reminds himself of that, takes a deep breath, and pushes in.

They’ve already pulled out the drawers with each of the bodies. The photos in the file had been on-site at each of the victims’ place of death, so in comparison these are a little tidier. But that also means there’s not much to keep Zack from looking at the deep wounds and thinking about just how fast that would’ve killed the person.

“Huh,” comes from beside him and he looks over to see Cloud a half-step behind, an expression of reluctant confusion struggling onto the man’s face.

“Yeah, this one all looks—” Zack belatedly checks his phone, where he has the autopsy report up “—so far looks accurate. I don’t think we have to spend a ton of time here, and Spike, if you’d rather keep trying to get the—”

Cloud glances at him and Zack sees a flash of appreciation in the other man’s eyes, but then Cloud moves closer. He looks only a little less uncomfortable than he did when their plane’s wheels finally touched down, but he’s staring straight at the corpse. “That’s a lot.”

Zack suppresses a flinch as he turns back. “Yeah. Poor guy probably didn’t know what hit him, at least.”

For some reason, that gets him a weird look from Cloud. “But these all—he was still moving around. He didn’t die that fast.”

“He’s right.” Cissnei comes up at Zack’s other side, her stoneface a lot better than either of theirs but still letting enough through for Zack to get that she’s genuinely surprised. “These should’ve been instantly fatal, and I thought a lot more of these would be post-mortem, but they’re not.”

“But you said the autopsy…” Zack takes a look at that again. Then grimaces and sets down to actually checking all the notes against the body—they are accurate, but then he gets to the conclusion at the end. “Well, it’s not wrong in that there is a complete severing of the aorta.”

“It just happened three different places,” Cissnei adds as they look at the body.

So maybe that was simultaneous or near-so, and even a direct hit sometimes doesn’t immediately shut down all signs of life, just consciousness. But as they work through the other two bodies, they see the same thing where the reports are technically right for what they report, but leaving a lot out. There’s no way that these people died of, well, of just what the report says they died of.

Which is starting to smell like R&D’s been around, even though Cissnei says that these three were just flagged and not actually starting recruitment; she also swears up and down that the local pathologist isn’t R&D, even if they’re way too literal about what should go into a report. And then Cloud finds something else in one of the bodies.

“…is it rotting already?” he mutters, peering into a wound.

“No, they got everything on ice pretty fast. Didn’t do preservatives yet but there shouldn’t be any signs of decay,” Cissnei says. She’s down at the other end of this one, taking a closer look at the gouges in the skull.

Zack moves to where Cloud is, bending down and looking into where the leg has almost been ripped in two at the knee. He spots what the other man does, a darkish stain starting a couple inches inside. Then a light clicks on—Cloud’s hit flashlight mode on his phone—and he can see that it’s not a stain but some kind of…“Mold?”

“What?” Cissnei comes around to look too, but she barely takes a glance before backing up sharply. “If it’s contamination—where the hell is the pathologist, this should be bagged and tagged for biohaz—”

“Hey, hey, yeah but first I want to see—we’ve got masks on, calm down,” Zack says as he cranes his head to try and see better. It’s hard because the grey-black splotches are in more than one layer and the layers are all mashed into each other from whatever the person was fighting, but he’s actually thinking he should take that mold comment back. The stuff seems to be darker the deeper down it goes, which is the reverse of what it should be if it’s some gross corpse fungus. “Okay, but we should have them sample this and look into it some more. Cloud, make sure you get this documented. Ang—General Hewley’s gonna want before/after photos to go with the lab report.”

Cloud nods and pulls up the camera on his phone. While he gets his photos, Zack and Cissnei go back out and find the on-duty pathologist, who seems authentically surprised and perturbed by the finding. They swear that there hadn’t been any such signs during the autopsies themselves, which had only taken place a couple days ago, and show Zack some of the camera roll from that to prove it.

“Well, just segregate that whole room, and any samples you take from them,” Cissnei says. “Level Thr—Four. I’d say Level Four.”

As weird as this all is, Zack can tell the pathologist isn’t thrilled about being lectured on how to do their job, but they politely agree with her that that’s the appropriate protocol. They’re probably going to do it, but not exactly giving her brownie points for asking. “Should we air-mail samples for central testing?” they ask. “We can do it here too, but the equipment is older and it’ll actually take longer for the results to come back.”

“No,” Zack says, cutting off whatever Cissnei had been about to say. He does his best to smile like there’s no potential team lead disagreement here, of course they’re united in this. “We’re going to be doing interviews for a couple days at least. We’ll be here, just come find us.”

“But it’d still be fast…okay, sir,” the pathologist shrugs.

They leave him to start collecting supplies and go back out into the hall. “Sorry,” Zack says.

He’s ready with an excuse about budgets and the pain of getting a charter flight just to send samples back, but turns out he doesn’t need that. “No, R&D should stay out of this for now,” Cissnei says. “You ever see something like that before?”

Zack shakes his head slowly. He’s not lying, he hasn’t seen this…but he’s seen a lot of different ways that recruiting doesn’t go well, especially when R&D decides to change the onboarding treatments without telling anyone. Angeal doesn’t let him see the fatal ones, but he collects the autopsy reports for the other man and he knows both Angeal and Genesis read every one of them, even if they don’t talk about it in front of Zack.

“Look, when we said that R&D didn’t enroll them, we were telling the truth. I looked into that myself,” Cissnei adds in a low voice. “I watched the footage of their medical visits, they weren’t in for long enough, and they didn’t get anything more than the same flu shot we all get. None of their scripts got filled till they were back in Corel.”

“I hear you, I’m not—nobody’s saying you lied. We don’t even know if this was pre- or post-mortem yet, so let’s just see what the testing comes back with,” Zack says. He’s a little surprised at how heated Cissnei’s voice is getting. “It could still be contamination from whatever drippy old mine shaft they were calling up ghosts in.”

“That’s not what your face says,” Cissnei mutters, but she seems to be chilling out again.

It might have to do with Cloud coming out of the other room. Cissnei asks if he’s got what he needs, then points out that he’s forgotten to take off his face-mask. She does seem a little more willing to talk to Cloud than Zack for some reason; they’ve interacted with each other before, but just in the office and never in the field, and honestly Zack can’t remember them saying more than maybe something about the terrible office coffee to each other.

But whatever works, works, and so he lets Cloud chat her up while he takes care of a couple administrative things with the morgue, like making sure they have all the right codes for the testing and won’t accidentally flag this to R&D anyway. Angeal didn’t say as much, but Zack figures somebody somewhere is going to be checking in and routing around R&D is just reflex to him at this point, so he gets off a couple messages to certain Midgar contacts too for belt-and-suspendering that.

He also shoots Angeal a quick note, just enough to explain why testing is happening and why they’re keeping it local. He doesn’t expect an immediate reply and he doesn’t get one, so they all go to lunch.

“Not our preferred itinerary, trust me, but you want a sit-down meal, we have to do it now. Otherwise we’re gonna be scarfing down ration bars while hiking around the North Country neighborhood,” Zack tells Cissnei as they take a table in the cafeteria.

She shrugs. “I’m taking some meetings this afternoon so you’ll have to do your sightseeing without me, but happy to do lunch now so we can just itemize the one meal.”

Zack makes a face, but it’s pure reflex at hearing ‘itemize.’ Then he really hears what she’s saying and he blinks. “Wait, you’re—what are you doing?”

“I’ve got meetings,” Cissnei says blandly, and then she asks Cloud to pass the hot sauce. He does that and she adds it to her braised greens—the cafeteria actually provides some options that look like somebody got out to a proper grocery, though it’s all underseasoned to Zack’s taste—and they sit in awkward silence for a few seconds. Then she sighs. “Zack, it’s nothing personal, it’s just we’re sitting in an actual common area right now.”

“Hey, listen, nobody said you had to disregard your security clearances for little ol’ me. Besides, Cloud and I are grown men, we can totally do our rounds without you,” Zack says, digging into his mashed yams. “I just kind of thought co-investigating meant we’d at least sync up schedules, but if you want to just surprise us, I can be spontan—”

Cissnei looks annoyed with him, but she draws back just on the point of unloading and instead aggressively sips at her drink. Then she puts that down. “We can have dinner in the guest quarters—come to mine—and compare notes, how is that?”

“Works for me,” Zack says with a smile. “Pass the hot sauce?”

The smile is maybe a little much, says her side-eye, but she gives him the bottle. And then she tilts her head as he proceeds to dose up his greens to appropriate heat levels. “They’re not that bad.”

“No, I know, but then you add in this—” he spoons in some yams “—and stir and voila! Almost like pepper greens. Well, if you pretend that they threw in pork at some point, but I’m not gonna pretend like I haven’t resorted to chicken broth since the good people in Procurement seem to think stock just comes in one flavor.”

“Pepper greens?” Cissnei says and as hard as she’s trying, a laugh is sneaking into her eyes. “Wow, I haven’t heard somebody talking about that since I moved up here.”

“Then you haven’t eaten with Zack much,” Cloud mutters.

Normally this would be Zack’s cue to protest that he’s a great meal ticket, thank you, and then suggest all the ways that he can open someone’s culinary horizons because he has, and he doesn’t think this is bragging, an honorary doctorate in eating his way through every one of Midgar’s Sectors. It’s also a great way to get everyone except the most die-hard assholes to warm up to you, and even Genesis has been known to take a rec from Zack, despite threatening to kill anyone who mentions it. But this time Zack doesn’t because he’s learning something personal about Cissnei. “Up here?” he repeats. “Back up, so where are you—are you from the south? Exactly how far south are we talking, if we’re talking about pepper greens? Because usually you have to go about as far down as me to find somebody smiling over them, though I have no idea why because they’re awesome.”

For the briefest second, Cissnei’s face plays around with its standard Turk mask…and then she lets it slip about halfway down, just enough for her to betray a kind of confused mix of pride and defensiveness. “Well, it’s not like you’re the only Gongagan who’s moved up here ever.”

“No, but I am the official greeting party and I cannot believe I missed one!” Zack beams.

To which Cissnei shifts a little in her seat and then decides not to make a run for it. “Okay, but let’s save the kazoos for later,” she says. “I think we’re sharing enough with the general public already.”

“Oh, c’mon, you can’t just drop it without at least telling me if you’re red or green,” Zack says.

She rolls her eyes at him and then starts eating again. He mimics a stab to the heart, but he’s honestly fine to let it go, since they seem to be back on an okay footing. But once Cissnei’s finished her mouthful, she leans forward. “Red, but if anyone from my home village ever shows up, I said green.”

Zack hoots. Which does actually get them some attention from the servers and the tables on the other side of the room, who’ve all been more or less ignoring them up till now, so he ducks back into his food. Cissnei shakes her head at him, and for the next few minutes they just talk about the weather forecast.

She eats fast and didn’t take that much to begin with, so she finishes first. Zack is still hungry, and also needs a reason to get Cloud to get the second helping the kid never seems to get on his own, so he and Cloud go back to the buffet line. By the time they get back to their table, Cissnei has headed off to her meetings.

“She did mention it to me,” Cloud says to his box of food. They took their second round to go, and are now packing up their rental car. “That she had alternative scheduling. I sent it to your email but didn’t bring it up.”

“Well, we were in the middle of the morgue, you were busy,” Zack says. He checks that their cooler is secured to the floor, then pushes Cloud’s food back. “Nah, I’ll drive, you can finish that off. We can’t show up and have the locals think we don’t feed SOLDIERs properly.”

Cloud sighs at Zack, but goes around to the passenger side. By the time Zack gets behind the wheel, Cloud is well into the box. Still, that doesn’t keep him from asking. “I checked over the car, but do you think…”

“Spike, if you tell me this car’s clean, then it’s clean. I’ve seen you go head-to-head with Reno and much as I hate to admit it, he does set the standard when it comes to being a nosy asshole,” Zack says as he throws his arm over the top of his seat. One reason he feels so confident of that is that this is an older jeep that doesn’t come with a lot of the fancy computer integrations, but that also means it doesn’t come with rearview cameras and those do make it so much easier to back out of anything tighter than a jet hangar. “Also, yeah, I’m pretty sure she means Heidegger when she says she’s got meetings. Not meeting with him, I mean tracking down where he went.”

“Yeah,” Cloud mutters.

He sounds like he’s got a full mouth so Zack leaves him alone for a few minutes; even with drugs, Cloud doesn’t eat that much when they’re in the air. When they’re on the ground and he’s in the front, Cloud is usually fine so he loads up his stomach and Zack does his best to navigate them out of the pit of blind angles and hairpin turns that Corel calls the corporate parking garage. In Midgar SOLDIER gets priority right of way, but that’s absolutely not a guarantee against fender benders and Zack happens to pride himself on his driving skills. He hasn’t had to expense a rental car repair in his whole time being Angeal’s second-in-command.

Corel, however, damn near blots his record. Even once they get out of the garage, the business district is just this maddening tangle of three- and five-ways at weird angles with no street signs, and all the buildings have the same polished-up dumpy look so Cloud telling him to turn left at the bank or right at the supermarket doesn’t help either. The mining operations are near enough to throw off the GPS too, even with field-grade shielding, and it’s just painful. When they finally crawl out of the city proper, Zack slows as much as he thinks he can get away with—at least there aren’t many other vehicles, and most of them are heavy-load tractor trailers with hazards on—so he can take a couple breaths.

Outside the city, things…honestly aren’t that much prettier. He doesn’t like to say that about places because everybody has to make a home, but Corel is a hard place to find something nice to say about it. The mountains here are crowded close together, so the steep sides don’t let anything much taller than a bush grow, and even those look gnarly and yellowed where the leaves aren’t speckled with soot. Nibelheim’s pretty sparse on vegetation too, but the photos Cloud shows of his hometown usually come with pretty swoops of snow and sparkling icicles.

Corel is lots of bare rock, and abandoned bits of mining equipment perched above crazily-colored—in a deeply unhealthy, non-photogenic way—trailings coming out of holes like a drunk person just went around with a screwdriver and punched them out. There’s not a lot of noise other than the wind either, which is bizarre and more than a little unnerving as they drive farther out: Zack grew up with the constant buzzing of Gongagan mosquitos for white noise and then learned to replace that with the underfoot hum of engines and power lines and fans in Midgar, so this is just not in his frame of reference.

It seems to weird out Cloud too. Once he finishes eating, he rolls down his window and stares out of it for a minute or so, then tucks back into the opposite side of his seat. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone. I don’t even see rats.”

“Well, you know, part of traveling’s to broaden your horizons,” Zack says as he reaches down to change gear again—he’s not going to miss his gym hour at all with all the grade switches. “I think we’re going to be a little late, but that might work out. This way they don’t go straight from getting off shift to talking to us.”

“I think today is supposed to be their off-day,” Cloud corrects. He pretends not to notice Zack’s wince and gets out his phone. “So I put in some queries on Heidegger while we were waiting for the luggage and a couple came back already.”

Zack leans back in his seat. “Yeah? Anything good?”

“Depends on your idea of ‘good,’ I guess,” Cloud says. He pokes at his screen. “It’s…I asked them to redo them just in case they got the parameters wrong, but it’s kind of weird. Heidegger filed an expense report for the trip, but it’s not listed in his daily logs.”

“Okay, but those completely depend on whether his assistant is any good and we know he goes through them like Palmer and sugar cubes,” Zack points out.

Cloud nods without looking up. “Yeah, so I asked about board meeting attendance because there was one right around then, and he’s listed as absent. But it doesn’t say why and it usually would, and also when I asked for the Public Safety post-mortem on Sephiroth’s mission, I got told that that’s R&D property.”

“Okay, but Public Security owned the SOLDIER program back then,” Zack says. “Even if we’re all pretending Heidegger didn’t go with him, they should have their own write-up about it.”

“Yeah, I know. And it sounds like there is one, but they gave the file to R&D and don’t have it anymore,” Cloud says. “I stopped there because—”

“Yeah, no, that’s right. If we run into R&D, just note it and I’ll send it up to Angeal to decide how much he wants to prod them,” Zack says. They’re coming up on the last turn now and he can finally see the roofs of a small neighborhood. It looks pretty quiet and he thinks that’s interesting, since from what he understands, the families of miners on the same shift tend to all live near each other. “Can you tell how long Heidegger was probably out here?”

“At least a week, maybe a little longer. The expense report was put in twelve days after we think Sephiroth disappeared, and it doesn’t look like Sephiroth was here more than a day when that happened,” Cloud says. He peers over his phone, then glances down at it again. Then he pushes himself up while waving with his hand towards the left. He’s starting to get a little glassy-eyed. “No, I know it’s saying go the other way but I looked up the traffic alerts and there’s a sinkhole I don’t think they cleaned up yet—”

Zack does a u-turn, then grimaces as their wheels bump off the narrow road and then bump back on. “You know, I respect local ways but it really would’ve been nice if our guides could’ve started a little earlier.”

Cloud doesn’t comment, just puts his phone away and gets a white-knuckled grip on the door. The rest of the way is only a couple minutes and he looks okay when they get out of the car, but Zack still takes a second to look up at their surroundings to let him recover.

They’re supposed to be meeting two locals, the day- and night- shift leaders—which, okay, makes more sense that it’s actually the off-day for both shifts—of the nearest active mining operations to where the séance epicenter is. None of the victims actually worked on those shifts, but if there’s existing weirdness going on, then these two are supposed to be the people to know about it. The Chief Engineer offered to have them come into the office, but this isn’t that far from the haunted shaft itself and Zack was thinking they could get a sense of the landscape at the same time.

Also usually people feel less defensive when they’re near their home ground than when they’ve got to sit in a Shinra interview room. So they agreed to do this at the neighborhood watering hole instead, which actually looks nicer than the bars in town. It at least has a sign, and while the neon lighting is clearly a DIY job, it’s not flickering and somebody regularly cleans off the soot.

“Oh,” Cloud says, drawing Zack’s attention to the two men walking out towards them.

“You the—I mean, Commander Fair, sir?” says one of them.

“Yep. Good afternoon! Mr. Wallace, right?” Zack says, putting his hand out.

Barret Wallace, since he grunts in an affirmatory way, doesn’t hesitate to take it but does make it into one of those squeezing contests. The night-shift lead, Dyne, is a beat slow to step up after Barret lets go of Zack’s hand, using that second to give Zack an up-and-down look, but he’s brisker about his handshake. And both of them aren’t obviously seething at home-office presence, even if they’re not exactly naturally bubbly types.

They go back inside and Zack turns down the offer of beer, but accepts a dish of bar nuts for him and Cloud. In short order he runs through what Barret and Dyne know about the deaths so far, which unfortunately isn’t much. It’s basically what’s in the public-safety warnings plus a little color on the victims’ families, none of which seems immediately relevant to the deaths except to show the victims weren’t social outcasts and their post-séance change in personalities was picked up pretty fast. Barret and Dyne seem cautious about answering questions, and definitely drop some cynicism about how seriously the deaths are getting taken in Midgar, but they don’t come off as hiding anything.

“Yeah, people are worried, but they’re not supposed to be going down that damn shaft anyway,” Dyne says with a huff. He pushes back from the table and folds his arms over his chest, looking for the first time as if he’s not just wary but actively thinking he’s being targeted. “It’s been shut down for over ten years, and before that it wasn’t active.”

“Shut down for safety, right?” Zack prompts. “It looks like that’s what the records say.”

Barret shrugs. “Ain’t gonna rewrite those.”

Zack suppresses a sigh. They were going to hit a roadblock at some point, but he’s a little surprised it’s over this when this part is just routine fact-checking. “I’ve just been reading up since we’re going in there later, and wanted to get an idea of what kinds of issues we might be walking into,” he tries. “Mostly it seemed to be gas issues, but if that’s still around, I’m surprised it’s so popular. People are gonna be people but usually they do want to walk back out of something.”

Barret snorts again, but then looks over at Dyne, who’s been leading on most of the answers. They’re the same in seniority, if Zack remembers correctly, and both have consistently good evaluations in their records. There were a couple arrests on Barret’s file, but all from when he was a teenager and none of them sounded like more than stupid pranks. Dyne is cleaner, and also he has a cousin who’s in SOLDIER, although in a low-level administrative role, but maybe that makes him a little more comfortable dealing with Zack and Cloud.

“There probably is still gas but we’re not going that far down—well, unless you think we should, sir, but as far as I know, those idiots spreading ghost rumors just like to play around near the old runoff,” Dyne says. He pauses and makes a gesture at the table between them, and when Zack nods to go ahead, he starts drawing with his fingertip. “It was a vent to the stream and they didn’t close it up with the rest because the water was still running back then, but it shifted away and the tunnel’s dry now. You can go in twenty, thirty feet without losing sight of the entrance, but after that it starts bending around.”

“Rock’s got a lot of holes in it from the water wearing it away,” Barret chimes in. “It’s soft and hard mixed together, and the soft dissolves and then cracks so the hard falls in. Sometimes you get animals crawling in too, widening them.”

“Is it easy to get to?” Zack asks.

Both of them shake their heads. “There’s a path, kind of, but it’s not the kind of thing you go on when you’ve been drinking some and want to keep scaring yourself shitless,” Dyne says. “But then, I’m a boring old man now.”

“Boring, hell, you keep this place lit, you know that,” Barret says with a clap on the shoulder. That makes Dyne look at him and smile; they do seem like long-time friends. “Some people just want to be fools. No time to be thinking about ghosts if you’re doing your job—you should be thinking about how to keep your friends from being ghosts, you ask me.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Zack says. He tries to just slide that in there in a friendly way, but they both go back to looking at him like they’re counting down to the next question. “Well, look, I’m not here to judge why people do what they do—whatever that is, we’re here to keep them from getting hurt. But it’d help if we had some idea how they do it, like why that spot, why people like to tell ghost stories about it. You don’t have to believe in that kind of thing to just get curious and go look, and there are a lot of inactive shafts around here. Why that one?”

Barret scoffs, but Dyne seems to take this under more serious consideration. “I don’t really listen to that any more than Barret does, but…yeah, there’ve been stories about that one for going back years. Back to when it wasn’t full shut-up, but just wasn’t being mined anymore,” he finally says. “You remember, those old guys who played checkers every Saturday, they’d talk about how the old professor used to go looking in there for his dead wife.”

“Sure, I remember, same as they’d go on and on about that damn fish as big as a house one of them almost caught,” Barret cracks.

“Who?” Zack says. “There was a professor here? But there’s no college.”

Just vocational training programs, but they refer anyone good enough for a degree back to Midgar or Kalm or Rocket Town. Though maybe Zack could’ve put that a little better because Barret scowls at him. But Dyne taps the man on the arm before Barret can say anything. “It was just a nickname, I don’t think he ever taught—he didn’t that I remember, and I saw him a couple times when my dad took me into work,” Dyne says. “He was doing some research for R&D but not full-time because he helped out the engineers and sometimes the doctors, seemed to have time on his hands. What was his…”

“Oh, you mean Valentine?” Barret says, tilting his head. “Yeah, I remember him, my grandma used to say he was the saddest-looking man you’d ever met, but a pretty damn good shot. He hunted, he’d hand off his extras sometimes and we got a grouse from him once.”

Valentine doesn’t ring a bell, but Zack glances over at Cloud and Cloud is already typing away on his phone, probably done with notes and onto shooting off more research inquiries. “Sounds like he isn’t around anymore. That right?”

“Nah, he isn’t. I’m not sure what happened to him…he wasn’t on staff when Barret and I started full-time,” Dyne says. “But you can probably ask Chief Findlay, maybe the engineers know.”

“What about his wife? How did she die?” Zack asks.

That gets him blank faces. Then Dyne and Barret look at each other, and the little start they each make upon seeing the other is thinking they should know is about as authentic as you can get. “Honestly, never really thought about it—like I said, don’t listen to bullshit like that,” Barret says. “But we all just heard she’d died, and that was why he looked like that all the time. I’m not sure she ever—I mean, I never heard of anyone meeting her. Don’t know if she ever was even here.”

“Well, he was going into the shaft looking for her,” Dyne says.

“Listen, man, it’s a ghost story, and it ain’t my ghost story,” Barret says with fake irritation. “You think I know how it works?”

“Okay, I think I get it. I mean, you hear more, I would like to know about it just in case it’s got any clues, but mostly I was just curious,” Zack says.

He changes the subject to their tour of the shaft. Barret and Dyne are recommending Zack and Cloud get an early dinner here at the bar, since they’re finishing up prep work for that. They don’t want to take the trail up to the runoff outlet, partly because they think that’ll just encourage more people to try it, rough as it is, so they’re planning on going the long way around, through the main tunnel that the runoff was acting as a drain for. But since that’s been shut up, they’re having a team blow some fresh air down it first.

Once again, Zack thinks that this could’ve been coordinated a little better. If he and Cloud had known, maybe they could’ve had a longer lunch with Cissnei or sat in on some of her meetings.

“I don’t think she wanted company for them. She did tell me she was doing them, but didn’t share names or even if she was doing them in the building,” Cloud says. Barret and Dyne left to go check on their team and the rest of the bar is empty besides one waitress and a cook they occasionally hear banging in the kitchen but who doesn’t come out, but he keeps his voice low anyway. “I think she might be doing house visits. She was looking up a street address on her phone.”

“Look at you, out-Turking the Turk,” Zack says. “Where was it?”

Cloud had briefly straightened, but now he ducks his head. “Didn’t get that—she noticed I was looking and locked her screen.”

“Well, it’s fine. We’re not here to babysit her, and if she doesn’t want to tell us, then she’ll have to live with me accidentally jumping into her sting operation because I’m not planning on checking where she is before we go out,” Zack says with a shrug. He does think Cissnei was genuine about wanting to not work against each other, and he’s still planning on taking her up on that offer to share notes over dinner. But he’s here to run an investigation into these deaths, not into her. “Anything on this Professor Valentine? I know you’ve had all of half an hour, but…”

“He was an R&D scientist. Full-time, not a contractor,” Cloud says, his brows rising. “Also, he was actually from here, though his files says he left to get degrees in Midgar and Wutai, and then didn’t come back till Shinra posted him here. Not sure when exactly that was, but it looks like his last paper was published fourteen years ago.”

“Then Heidegger might know him, he does go that far back,” Zack thinks aloud. So should Hollander, but if the guy had been on the right side of the Hojo-Hollander rivalry, Cloud would be reading off tons of info on him. “Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Cloud says. He chews on the last word a bit before letting it go. “I mean, I’ll keep looking, but his file says he dropped off payroll around the time Sephiroth disappeared.”

“Retired or laid off?” Zack says.

Cloud shakes his head. “Doesn’t say, just has an end date. No reason for it.”

The more they look into this, the more names they get and the more holes come up, even though these people literally all were in this town during the same time frame. And it’s not a big place, Zack thinks as he stares across the table at the door. Cissnei already tipped them off to there being undercurrents, but Zack isn’t exactly a stranger to that at Shinra and this is…it feels different. Shinra isn’t exactly nice to its losers, but usually it’s all about the public humiliation—take Hojo, for example. Hollander didn’t just make the guy go into a retirement home somewhere, he exiled him to Nibelheim and then made sure that everybody going forward knew what a shitty scientist he was.

“Doesn’t look like Valentine did anything related to SOLDIER research,” Cloud offers. “But I’ll keep looking.”

“Yeah, but don’t obsess over it yet. If he wasn’t in genetics, then I don’t know how related this is—might just be the neighborhood crazy-man story at the time, and once Sephiroth disappeared it morphed into a ghost story,” Zack says.

He might as well eat, since nothing else he’s doing at the moment is making any of this clearer. And the waitress is coming over with their food now, which at least smells good. And tastes way ahead of the cafeteria food, Zack discovers when he tries it.

In fact, it’s so good that he actually misses that the waitress hasn’t walked away till Cloud kicks him. “Thank you so much, this was great,” Zack says on reflex.

“You said that already,” Cloud mutters.

The waitress smiles a little uncertainly at them. “You’re welcome,” she says, and then hesitates. “I…really wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but when you were talking with my husband earlier…Dyne’s my husband.”

“Ah, well, I really appreciate him showing us around, Eleanor,” Zack says, at least clocking her name-tag without Cloud’s help.

She smiles again. She’s got the kind of motherly face that makes you peg her as older than you even when she’s not, and worry lines that don’t go away even when her smile is broader. “It’s no trouble, Commander. He and Barret, all they try and do is keep people out of trouble, and they really are worried more people are going to get hurt with these ghost stories. They do get curious just like you said, and then they don’t think before they do something about it.”

“Yeah, I agree,” Zack says.

Eleanor looks pleased, but something is still eating at her. She twists one foot as if to step away, but then hesitates. Then she leans down with a glance at the doorway even though they’ve got a clear view of the parking lot and there aren’t any new cars.

“Dyne really doesn’t think anything of these stories, but then he doesn’t believe in anything he can’t touch and see for himself,” Eleanor says quietly. “I don’t…want to believe in them either, but you said just hearing what they say might help you keep more people from getting hurt.”

“Yeah. Look, SOLDIER is here to find the killer no matter what they are, and they can come in all shapes and sizes. And when you’re scared and running, you can see something and not realize what it really is—and I get that, it’s not like accurate ID is your top priority. But I just don’t want to miss anything that might help point us the right way,” Zack says. His instincts are starting to engage and he pushes his plate away from him a couple inches as he looks at her. She has something she wants to get off her chest. “Even if it sounds ridiculous, I’m still willing to hear it. What’s important is that we stop the killing.”

Cloud nods along, then smoothly turns out a chair in Eleanor’s direction as she takes in a slow breath. Her eyes go to it without her startling and Zack almost breaks in, he’s so proud of the kid…but he keeps himself in check and after another moment, Eleanor pushes the seat away. Instead, she gestures for them to follow her.

“I’m not proud of this,” she says as, after sharing a look, they get up from the table. “But when I was younger, I was pretty into ghost stories too, and I’d go hunting them with my friends. I haven’t gone looking for this Sephiroth, but I went looking for Dr. Valentine and I can tell you that one.”

Notes:

I know pepper greens is the name of a real dish in several regions, but I didn't have any specific version in mind. Just braised greens of some kind plus hot sauce.

Red versus green pepper seems to be the eternal pepper debate anywhere there is hot sauce.

Chapter 9: Past

“What sent my mother to Hojo in the first place?” Sephiroth asks Valentine when the man comes again. With another thick stack of printouts to go with food and water, and as much as Sephiroth is itching to pounce on them, he holds himself back. He’s been putting together a list of questions in his head from the first batch and he’s determined to have some of them answered before he allows the man to lure him with more documents. “She wasn’t initially interested in genetics, though she had some training in it. And she references other offers she had that she regrets not taking.”

Valentine has his back to Sephiroth and is bending down to leave Vincent his packet of blood. He stiffens as he continues to gaze at the unmoving shadows. “She did have other offers—she could have joined the team at Icicle Inn, or another team in Midgar. She was an excellent researcher and could have decided to specialize in half a dozen fields without any problem. But I think it was my fault.”

As he finishes, he seems to give up on waiting for Vincent and turns towards the cell. Behind him, the shadows remain as they are, but Sephiroth picks up the sound of Vincent’s breathing; he’s starting to think that whatever sound-cloaking ability Vincent has is present by default and Vincent has to deliberately drop it. Either that or the man needs as little sleep as Sephiroth.

When he’s not recovering from blood loss and eating inadequate rations in a chilly cave, that is. Sephiroth did start to doze towards the end of this last stint, but the scuff of Valentine’s shoes in the hall woke him. “Meaning?” he prompts impatiently.

“My research into Chaos,” Valentine says. Before he’d gone to Vincent, he’d put the printouts down just out of Sephiroth’s reach, pushing over the food and water first, and when he sees that Sephiroth hasn’t touched either yet, he frowns. “I brought some of my shorter monographs so you can have some idea of it, but you should eat first. Unless—are there other symptoms?”

Sephiroth catches himself trying to finger his arm. He threw out the remains of his bandages, but the scarred tissue puckers and itches whenever he moves the arm too quickly, and also sometimes it feels strangely warm and then half-numbed. He’s not showing any other signs of fever at the moment, but it could be a sign of caloric depletion. Still, he hasn’t decided whether he wants to mention that issue to Valentine yet.

“Did the victims have specific issues you’re worried about?” he asks instead. “Am I starting to sound like them?”

“No,” Valentine says. He doesn’t sound as if he doubts that opinion, but he is studying Sephiroth carefully. “But you look…your healing has plateaued, hasn’t it? Does it usually do that? Does Hojo give you any kind of supplements?”

“If he did, then you’ll notice shortly,” Sephiroth says dryly. He does push himself off the wall, sliding carefully around his sorted piles of paper to go retrieve the food and water. His stomach is growling for it and since that doesn’t appear enough to raise Valentine’s levels of guilt, it’s pointless to deprive himself. “Other people should notice, too. I don’t mean that as a threat—you’re an observer and a planner, I assume you’ve taken countermeasures. I’m only curious as to what they are.”

Valentine half-opens his mouth a few times as if to interrupt, but ultimately he lets Sephiroth speak unhindered. It’s only after Sephiroth has started drinking his water that the other man seats himself on the floor. He picks up the new papers and shuffles them as if to split them up, but then lays the entire bundle against one knee.

“Heidegger noticed you missed the morning meeting but said you were probably deviating from instructions, and when you turned up again he’d send you up for a disciplinary hearing,” Valentine says. His tone and composure are as dully pained as before he’d tricked Sephiroth into the mine, but he does display far more obvious distaste about Heidegger. “I had the impression he might be terrified of it coming to actually having to look for you.”

Sephiroth snorts. In all honesty, he hadn’t been counting on that corner, even in his most irrational moments. “He is. He knows half this place would be more than happy to drive a pickax into his back and then blame it on a falling stalactite.”

Valentine nods, not looking happy at that idea but not looking repulsed by it either. “Hojo called me again,” he says, and then looks up. “Were you expecting that?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth says curtly. He’s already given himself away by flinching, he thinks angrily, so there’s no point in trying to fool Valentine now. “He still believes I fall under his purview. He is a little faster to pick up on a cover-up than Heidegger.”

“I know. The accident I had, it was actually a botched assassination by Hojo,” Valentine says. He puts his hand out, the one not holding the papers, and turns it so his scars are visible. Then he pulls it in and starts to divide the bundle into sections. “I’d filed some objections to his proposed plan to extract DNA from the Jenova specimen he’d found—I’m not a geneticist, but I’ve studied Chaos all my life and there are some references to an ancient entity they warred with that fit the description of Jenova. If they’re one and the same, then the references are very clear that Jenova brings plague and other miseries with her. That’s what your mother was interested in.”

“The idea of tracing diseases back through folklore and history,” Sephiroth says. Yes, she had been, that had been a clear passion of hers. Even during her worst, last days, she’d still managed to communicate her love of knowledge, and it’d made him think of how furtive he’d had to be growing up in Hojo’s lab—having to be fantastically intelligent for testing purposes yet idiotically blind to the man’s machinations. “So you tried to kill his project and he tried to kill you.”

Valentine sighs. It’s obviously not a fond memory of his, and yet he’s lacking in fury or even fear. “I knew he was going to react badly—I’d already been at Shinra for five years when he started here, I’ve seen his entire career. Still, the objections needed to be filed. Lucrecia helped prepare them, and she knew Hojo was behind the accident, but I think—I think she thought he could still be made to see reason, if he only understood why we were making them. She tended to think that people simply didn’t understand everything if they were upset at something.”

“So she joined his lab on your behalf?” Sephiroth says.

And finally a little force comes into Valentine. “I would never have asked—I would have warned her,” he says, and then has to pause till his breathing calms. Even then, his tone retains a true backbone to it. “When I did wake up, I tried to warn her. I asked—Vincent was already looking into my accident, and I asked him to try and talk to her when he went to follow up on her witness statement. I wish I…but I have to live with unfulfilled wishes, I recognize that. This is my research, this is the set of objections I filed, and this is what Chaos has volunteered over the years.”

“Since you’ve had over a decade now to have the facts from the source,” Sephiroth says. He puts down the food and water and watches Valentine use his gun to push over the new stacks of papers. “You should have clarity now.”

Valentine jerks a little, then shakes his head. He understands Sephiroth is jabbing at him, but seems saddened by it rather than offended. “I’ve tried to organize what I have, but…”

“Don’t tell me it isn’t your area again,” Sephiroth says before he can help himself. Earlier he’d decided to try being relatively civil and showing interest in Valentine’s research—and he is interested, but it’s inextricably intertwined with his outrage at having to purchase it with captivity again. He differs from his mother in that much, he thinks, since she never expressed any kind of anger or resentment, only regret. “When you’ve had more than a few years to exclusively study it, it is your area.”

Then again, Valentine seems to take any kind of dialogue as an expression of interest, and seems gratingly thankful for it. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. But I don’t want to claim expertise—I have been trying, and I want you to see what I’ve tried to put together. But I also don’t want to fool you that this can be called definitive. Chaos is…an unreliable witness at times…and has an agenda of their own…”

When he falters, he glances repeatedly at the corner but no response is forthcoming. This seems to concern Valentine, but not to the point of urgency, and so Sephiroth deduces that there’s still some time before a transformation threatens. Six hours is likely not a lie, but it’s also not a precise number from the way both men act.

“I’ll read this,” Sephiroth says, so that Valentine looks back at him, and then he pushes off his knee and stretches an arm out for the fresh material. “But it’s not going to substitute for direct answers from you.”

He half-expects Valentine to fob him off with another apology, or perhaps some more guilty self-deprecation, but the man suddenly decides to be direct. “I know. This is—difficult for me to talk about, and all the more because you’re her son. I—will try, the next time I’m here. Also if it looks like Heidegger will wait another night before searching for you, I can at least let you shower.”

Then Valentine abruptly picks up the old waste bucket and walks out with it. He’s so hurried all of a sudden that he almost knocks into the new, empty one, but instead of stopping he merely half-hops it on the way to the door. His voice had changed as well, from that soft, sad monotone to something so overstuffed with emotions that they were tearing it from the inside.

Sephiroth starts to demand the man come back, but he can already see Valentine has no intention of doing so. He angrily catches himself against one of the bars, then pushes himself back. Then, fruitlessly, he hits the bar with his open palm before slumping down against it. That damned—he looks at the papers, but it’s a few more seconds before he actually sees them. Valentine’s far sharper than his mournful façade lets on, and self-aware enough to work with his weaknesses rather than fight them. He’s damnably good and Sephiroth damn well better stop falling for it.

He adjusts his shoulder against the bar, then idly tilts his head against it to finger the bottom of it. He’d tested another one a few hours ago, when muscle cramps had forced him to leave off reading long enough to stretch out his limbs, and Vincent is as damnably infuriating as his father for being accurate about how well-built the cage is. Even completely healthy and fully-armed, Sephiroth might have some trouble breaking out of it.

As he is…Sephiroth bats at the bar again, then watches how a fine tremor goes up his arm even after he pulls his hand away. His stomach is still unsatisfied too. There is still some food—he turns and looks at it, but then turns back and pulls the papers into his cell. Then he takes one sheaf back to where he’d been sitting, planning to read while he finishes up his meal.

“He’s not going to forget about the supplements.” Vincent is out in the middle of the room, sitting with his blood packet again. Of course there hadn’t been any warning noises, not until after Sephiroth had already startled. “If you don’t tell him what you need, he’s going to—”

“Experiment on me anyway? That’s familiar,” Sephiroth mutters. He tugs the food over to his hip and braces the papers against his knee, then starts to read. Then stops and rubs at his eyes; the lighting is harsh but adequate, and he knows he simply doesn’t want to admit to needing sleep. “Also forgive me if I’m not immediately inclined to volunteer my information to a man who drugs his son via food.”

“I know he’s doing it,” Vincent says, apparently in the mood to defend his father. He is turned partly away from Sephiroth, and now twists to fully put his back to the cell. “If he didn’t, you wouldn’t have come here to investigate those deaths, you’d have come to kill me and take back the mines.”

The obvious reply is to say that Sephiroth hasn’t ruled that out, but he swallows it back. He’s already half-into the paper before him, which is a compilation of excerpts from various folklore references about Jenova. But also it occurs to him that Vincent would prefer that kind of bitterness. It’d give the man a reason to crawl back to his corner, and without it Vincent has to come up with his own.

“You stopped healing, and now you’re starting to get worse. I can tell,” Vincent says. His head dips when Sephiroth looks up, but then it comes up again and his hands are still in his lap, so he wasn’t biting into the blood bag. “You’re not going to last long enough if you don’t tell him when you need basic—”

“Last long enough for what?” Sephiroth snaps. “I took myself out of Hojo’s damned clutches, do you think I’m going to suffer another man’s—you might be happy to let him treat you like a lab specimen but—”

“If you’re weak enough, she’s going to take you over and then we have to kill you,” Vincent snaps back.

“If you’re trying to save me, tell me what you did to me in the first place,” Sephiroth parries. He leans forward as Vincent’s shoulders hunch, but when no response is forthcoming, he isn’t surprised in the least. “You’re both fond of telling me all sorts of things, but you won’t actually answer any questions. For all I know, one of you fooled my mother into believing she was helping you by going to Hojo.”

From what Sephiroth has read, he knows that had at least been a contributing factor, although Lucrecia’s notes had never specified what part of Hojo’s research had interested her. Still, she had made it clear she wanted to avoid some sort of mistake she’d made while working for Valentine, and it’s not too hard to draw links from that to Valentine’s comments. But when the muscles of Vincent’s back abruptly swell and then appear to divide under the skin, it catches Sephiroth by surprise.

The shadows—his eyes flash to the far wall as he instinctively flattens against the one at his back and he sees that they’ve altered to a monstrous silhouette. He looks back at Vincent and the man is—still a man, but only thanks to obvious effort. Labored breathing, one white-knuckled hand slapped against the floor, lowered head. Vincent is pushing back Chaos and then Sephiroth remembers.

He hisses, putting one hand to his head as if physical motion is going to bar her from his mind—and inside of his head, he’s scouring his thoughts for any trace of an alien presence. He doesn’t—he doesn’t sense her, but he does sense something. Some sense that he’s being watched, and not from Vincent’s direction.

And then it’s gone. He exhales, then scrabbles at the pad underneath himself—he hadn’t realized his arm had fallen, nor that he’d started to slide down the wall. As he pushes himself back up, Vincent shakes his head and then throws it back to show a face twisted into a pained, silent snarl.

Sephiroth puts his hand back up to his own face, then wipes his fingers across his brow and down his hairline. They come away damp, covered with clammy sweat. He grimaces and wipes them off against his trousers before reaching back for the papers. Arguing isn’t merely unproductive, it’s dangerous until he understands—until he can master the controls, he thinks.

“I try not to lose my temper so that doesn’t happen,” Vincent mutters, echoing his thoughts. The man opens his eyes wide, staring at the ceiling, and then slowly lowers his head. He picks up the packet of blood from where it’s fallen beside him, but still only weighs it in his hand. “Try to sleep, but—I didn’t fool her. Your mother. I didn’t, but Father…he loved her. They were in love.”

Sephiroth jerks his head up and starts to reply, but then stops himself. All this constant new information, it’s almost enough on its own to drive someone mad trying to keep up with it, and then he actually needs to absorb it…but he’d had a hint with how Valentine had left, he thinks. He’d had hints in Lucrecia’s writing, now that he has the framing for them. And honestly, this doesn’t stop him from still being furious at the man, not only on his behalf but on his mother’s, too.

“They never told each other. I didn’t figure that out till after—” Vincent shakes his head and Sephiroth tenses before realizing the man’s only signaling frustration, not another brewing transformation “—if I’d known, I wouldn’t have told her to let Hojo involve her so much. I thought she only wanted to clear her name, prove it was Hojo who sabotaged Father.”

“Someone blamed her for that?” Sephiroth asks, surprised. She hadn’t mentioned that in her notes. She hadn’t written anything that contradicted it either, but he’s going to test anything he’s told by Vincent or Vincent’s father.

Vincent grimaces. “It was in the Turk report on it—I didn’t think so, she ended up dragging him out after all…she showed me it wasn’t her fault, then came back to die with him, and he’s been trying to make up for it ever since.”

“You included in that, I take it,” Sephiroth says. That earns him a sharp twist away, and then Vincent biting into the blood packet, but he doesn’t think that’s a denial. “Thank you for answering that question.”

He watches till the emptied packet drifts to the floor, but Vincent makes no attempt to speak. The man does squat there for a few more minutes, but he seems to have retreated mentally even if his physical form hasn’t yet moved to his corner and Sephiroth has these papers to read. Besides, Sephiroth wasn’t hoping for good manners from him.

“You should tell him before you pass out,” Vincent mutters.

Sephiroth pushes up the sheet against his knee. “Noted.”

Also noted is how Vincent has some degree of control over Chaos without the drugs, even if he does need their boost. The paragraph Sephiroth is trying to finish reading actually goes into that, discussing various beliefs around invoking Chaos and the degree to which they can be forcibly harnessed versus merely bribed into cooperation. These beliefs also invoke the Cetra, which Sephiroth has heard about from Hojo but now he also remembers Valentine disparaging Hojo’s take on them. The man is right about Hojo; on the other hand, Sephiroth has already tried to independently check what he can and he had thought he’d been able to access the little there is on the Cetra.

But he doesn’t remember anything like this paragraph, and as he skims down the page, he thinks at least half the cited references are completely new to him. He goes back and rereads more carefully—

“If he says he wants to get Jenova out of you, then he’s going to keep you till he can,” Vincent says. “He’s only going to stop if you’re dead.”

“Then try not to eat me before that, if you’re so concerned,” Sephiroth mutters. He reads half of the next sentence, then sighs and looks up. “Or tell him not to short you again. It’s not my responsibility to warn him if I’m more appealing than those bags.”

Vincent still has his back to Sephiroth, and when he moves, it’s towards the corner. Sephiroth looks back down, then up again, only to find that in that single second, Vincent has vanished back into his shadows. He purses his lips, then turns once and for all to the papers.

Chapter 10: Past

Valentine accurately described the second batch of papers as covering his research on Chaos. Sephiroth’s mother does occasionally garner a mention—Valentine credits other contributors far more assiduously than most R&D personnel would—but never in her own words. Of course he’s reading the materials for more than that, but he still can’t help…craving more from her. He’s accustomed to living on scraps about her, and ones mangled and dirtied by Hojo, but it’s already hard to remember that, having been able to spend several hours with her own notes.

He does have to reread them often as he draws connections and checks back to see what her take was on various references in Valentine’s work. Of course he’s already receiving these materials through Valentine’s curation, but to the extent he can try and discern where the man made editorial judgments, he does. And Lucrecia did have distinctive opinions on Valentine’s work: she doesn’t disagree with the broad conclusions, but here and there she highlights a nuance or offers an alternative interpretation.

They both seem to think that, contrary to what Hojo always told Sephiroth, the Cetra were a highly-advanced civilization and had a sophisticated system for understanding magic. Much of what now is accomplished via technology, the Cetra did with spells. Also the Cetra weren’t unfamiliar with military means, and did in fact know how to make and use magical weapons.

Valentine seems to think that the Cetra only did so for defensive purposes, but Sephiroth is gratified to see that his mother, diplomatic though she was about it, displayed a little more realism in her worldview. She specifically references some horrific nightmares she attributes to the Jenova cells that had passed from Sephiroth to her, and goes so far as to theorize that these might actually be transmitted memories of fighting against the Cetra.

She doesn’t describe the nightmares in detail, but refers back to some folklore studies documenting songs and stories that purportedly date back to Cetra times, which sends Sephiroth flipping back through Valentine’s research. Chaos seems deeply intertwined with the Cetra civilization in some way, and it’s an avenue that Valentine has concentrated on researching but that he doesn’t seem certain how to interpret. He makes less annotations here—then Sephiroth runs across one that references a document he doesn’t yet have.

Sephiroth snarls under his breath in frustration, thinking of how he’ll wave that in front of Valentine when the man comes again. Claiming to have given him as much as possible and then holding back for the next installment as if this is merely clever movie marketing…and then Sephiroth’s gaze skates across a pile of papers still just inside the bars.

He’d forgotten that one, so busy with re-sorting his mother’s notes from the first batch that he’d never even picked it up. He’s even more frustrated at his oversight and pushes over to grab the pile.

But he doesn’t make it there. The world spins about him and he cries out in alarm, jerking himself sideways and then scrabbling at the floor. He’s not going to see through her eyes, he’s not going to let that usurping alien do that to him—he thinks that, he focuses on that, and so completely misses how his arm goes out from under him.

She’s not in his head. She wasn’t in his head. It was only him, him and his maddeningly weakened body, fainting as if he hasn’t ever endured hardship before. It’s only him, damn it, and when the world finally steadies enough for him to see clearly again, he’s not even strong enough to hold up his own head.

Vincent is staring down at him as he stares back, with an expression that says the man is wondering how his hand came to be under Sephiroth’s head as much as Sephiroth wonders how Vincent moves that quietly with that much speed. “I told you,” he says.

“And I said…noted,” Sephiroth says. His mouth is cottony, even though he never fully lost consciousness. Although he had stopped sipping water after a while…he rocks his head a little on Vincent’s hand till he spots the water bottle.

Then he loses sight of that because Vincent is lowering his head to the ground. The man doesn’t immediately withdraw his arm but sits there as Sephiroth carefully shifts his shoulder, rolls his head off Vincent’s hand, and…the world starts wavering again. Sephiroth lets out an irritated noise but is forced to let his head drop back, and for some reason Vincent’s hand is still there to catch it.

“I think this is faster than it usually is for you,” Vincent says. He’s not looking at Sephiroth now and his expression has turned blank again. Now he worms his hand out from under Sephiroth’s hair, and then shifts along the bars till he can put his hand back in to reach Sephiroth’s bottle. Once he has it, he comes back along the bars and puts it back inside the cell, a few inches from Sephiroth’s nose. “I think when I bit you, it damag—changed something in you.”

“I see,” Sephiroth says pointedly. As long as he keeps his head down, he discovers he can move without any issue and he reaches for the bottle, making certain to flash his arm’s scars at Vincent as he does.

The side of Vincent’s mouth twists. His father comes through in the lack of offense taken, but alongside that is a cool kind of humor Sephiroth doesn’t see in Valentine at all. “Not just that. Not just me either—Chaos thinks that.”

Sephiroth twists off the bottle’s cap, then drags himself along the floor rather than pulling the bottle towards himself. Vincent had come right up to the bars to push the bottle through and the man hasn’t moved back at all. Both his hands are flat on the ground, two fingertips just poking through the bars, and they don’t betray any movement as Sephiroth exerts himself. But the man is still right there.

Right there. “Chaos doesn’t seem to mind me at the moment,” Sephiroth observes. “Even if Jenova isn’t in my head, her DNA isn’t going anywhere. Discerning of them.”

Vincent’s lips twist again. His hands are still. “I can taste her in you. It’s…not attractive.”

Sephiroth carefully lifts his head an inch off the ground. It tires him more than it should, but his vision isn’t blurring so he works his elbow under himself and tips some water into his mouth. “Then that should make restraining yourself easier. I might give myself a papercut, after all.”

A little irritation seeps into Vincent’s otherwise blank expression and he finally shifts back. “I didn’t bite you because I wanted to,” he says. “We—I bit you because—because you were fighting her off.”

“Then explain that to me, because that doesn’t make any sense and so far none of this—” Sephiroth gestures towards the papers while taking another drink “—explains it either. Why would weakening me help drive Jenova out when her entire characterization revolves around world domination? You’re making it easier for her to take me over, not harder.”

Vincent replies with a frustrated sigh. It’s almost a word and he’s looking directly at Sephiroth, not turning away as he would if he were cutting himself off. But he seems to run out of breath—at first Sephiroth thinks that’s what it is, and then he sees Vincent’s eyes change.

It’s nothing so obvious as the color or the shape of the pupils, but it’s clear anyway that Vincent is no longer the only one looking back at Sephiroth through them. Sephiroth’s skin prickles and his instincts scream to retreat, to throw up a guarding arm, but—no, he thinks, the more defense he plays, the more ground he cedes. And he remembers too that when Chaos is most evident, so is Jenova. Or so they’ve told him—he needs to see for himself.

“Damn it, don’t hide,” he snaps. Pushing himself up against the bars, pushing his hand between them to seize Vincent’s wrist. “I’m not done with you, don’t throw Chaos up and act as if they’re your shield—come back here and answer me.”

Vincent had started to realize what was happening to him and had immediately tried to leap backwards. Both his feet actually leave the ground before Sephiroth yanks him back down—he’s snarling and shaking his head, twisting himself away, acting in as much panic as anger.

He hasn’t transformed yet, though here and there his muscles are rippling unnaturally. But he’s much stronger than his build looks—much stronger than Sephiroth had braced himself for. The bottle of water goes skittering away, gurgling its contents out as Sephiroth’s leg scythes it on the way to Sephiroth being slammed up against the bars. He feels his skin split at the side of his head and across his ribs and hip, and the bone too might be—but he doesn’t let go. He might not be strong enough to win this wrestling match but he’ll make Vincent force the issue.

“Stop,” Vincent growls. He wrenches at his arm, then suddenly is up against the bars, his breath marginally hotter than the blood trickling down Sephiroth’s face. “Stop, you idiot, you’ll—”

“You could kill me even on the drugs he’s giving you,” Sephiroth hisses. “So you can stop pretending it’s only that. You make your choices—and if you say Chaos is—”

A sharp jerk by Vincent sends Sephiroth’s wrist banging against the bar. Pain shoots up his arm and then it goes numb and his fingers loosen. Vincent sucks his breath over his teeth and something dark and thin flicks out the other way: a snake-like tongue. His eyes, however, are entirely—and only—him.

“I know that. I know that, the drugs don’t stop them, they stop me,” Vincent snarls. Then his eyes widen and he falls silent.

He heaves back onto his heels but doesn’t flee to his corner, only staring at Sephiroth as the seconds stretch on. The adrenaline fades and pain bleeds back into Sephiroth, making him hitch and hiss a few times. He doesn’t try to push off the bars but does adjust the way he’s leaning to lessen the pressure on the new injuries and also check them: no complete fractures, he thinks, but potentially cracks and certainly soft-tissue damage. In better times it wouldn’t be serious enough to seek out medical treatment and he’d merely sleep it off. Right now…

But he still has papers to read through. They’re in his line of sight, and the water is—Sephiroth curses softly, yanking himself off the bars. But then he has to catch at them again as he sways.

“Chaos doesn’t sit outside of me the way that Jenova does you,” Vincent says. His hand comes back through the bars—not towards Sephiroth but towards the papers, which he picks up and then shakes so waterdrops come off the soaked edges. “I house them now. I’m…living with them. Sometimes I think I live as them, and the drugs…keep us separated. If I didn’t take them, then I think there would be a point where we can’t be separated anymore, and that’s what my father has been trying to do since Lucrecia and I came back. That’s what he’s saving you for.”

“I can understand that, to a point,” Sephiroth says. He can’t help but stare at the papers as he slowly steadies himself, but he tries not to sound too desperate. Also, to be honest, he’s exhausted. “I have no desire to merge with Jenova at this point. And if what your father has put together is even halfway accurate…but I also have no desire to be dissected simply because someone else thinks they know the best way to put me together. He’s no better than Hojo that way.”

Vincent breathes in sharply and for a moment Sephiroth thinks he may have triggered the man’s temper again. But he doesn’t protest, and it gradually occurs to Sephiroth that Vincent might instead have been trying to warn him a moment ago.

“You should read these,” the other man suddenly says. He shoves the papers back through the bars, dropping them before Sephiroth can fully wrap his fingers around them. When one falls right back into the pooling water, Vincent doesn’t try to stop it even though he’s close enough. He’s looking at Sephiroth. “My father spent his life on this, and he found—Chaos knows what they lived through, but doesn’t always understand it. I know—I know when I bit you, I could taste her but it—it got weaker, the more I drank. And we—Ch—I heard her less.”

“Then you don’t want a few drops now?” Sephiroth mutters. He pulls up the paper, grimacing at the way his shaky hands threaten to poke through the water-softened spots.

“You’re not going to heal if I take more,” Vincent points out.

Sephiroth snorts but pushes himself off the bars. A drop of blood lands on another of the sheets and then deforms on one side as he holds the whole handful up and awkwardly crawls around the puddle. When Valentine comes back, Sephiroth is likely still going to have visible bruising and Valentine is going to ask again about supplements, if they aren’t simply slipped into Sephiroth’s next meal.

He should consider that. Should plan for that, but first…he wants to finish reading. And when he looks up, Vincent is no longer out in the open, and so whatever he professes, doesn’t seem that invested in the outcome.

So Sephiroth turns the sheet over and starts reading.

* * *

By the time Sephiroth finishes the second batch, his eyes are burning and he’s developed an itching thirst in his throat. He hadn’t moved the bottle from where it’d rolled and when he goes to check it now, he finds that it still has a couple mouthfuls of water in it, which he promptly drinks. Which isn’t anywhere nearly enough to satiate him, but he’s not about to die and according to the wristwatch, Valentine should be along in another hour.

So Sephiroth goes back to the pad and lies down. He closes his eyes, then opens them because of the likelihood that Jenova might invade his mind while he’s sleeping—but he has to sleep at some point, even he can’t live without that. And he’s slept all his life and still woken up as himself in the morning.

Granted, he still doesn’t know what kind of trigger Valentine planted in the other tunnel, and it does seem to have altered something that lets Jenova have access to his mind. He thinks it’s an alteration—if it was a preexisting weakness, he should have had some sign of it before this. Hojo had put him through every possible stress test, and when even other Shinra personnel had been appalled enough to call it torture, the man had always responded that torture would leave marks but Sephiroth never retained any.

In retrospect Hojo probably had been looking for something like Valentine’s trap. His theories about Jenova and the Cetra are very different from what is presented in Valentine’s papers and Lucrecia’s notes, but what they all have in common is this idea that Jenova can withstand more than any human, more than anything human-designed. And admittedly, Sephiroth thinks, he would prefer to keep his preternatural abilities.

But he would also like to be the master of his own mind and fate, and in that he thinks Hojo was very wrong about Jenova. The fact that he still retains that desire has nothing to do with Jenova and everything to do with being able to better the alien in that much—has everything to do with his mother being human and thus granting him his own humanity. Hojo wanted to make a perfect robot, not a perfect soldier, and now Jenova wants a perfect body, not a perfect child.

Sephiroth has no intention of giving into either, and from what he’s gathered so far, something similar probably led the Cetra to their alliance-capture-coopting of Chaos: the exact nature of their relationship is still unclear but it is clear that both of them ended up opposing Jenova. Valentine doesn’t seem to have realized that till relatively late. Hojo probably realized it far earlier than he let on, hence the botched assassination on Valentine.

Something about that incident still hasn’t resolved itself for Sephiroth. He thinks he can accept his mother’s motivations as coming out of personal attachments of some kind—even if he still dislikes Valentine for being the center of them—and how that led to bad decisions later on by her, Vincent and Valentine, but there’s something…and his eyes snap open just on the edge of dozing off.

“Your father’s scarring,” Sephiroth says. “From the accident. When Chaos attacked him?”

Vincent hasn’t come out of his corner in all this time, and Sephiroth is fully prepared to have to spin out his thoughts for a while before the other man engages. So it’s surprising when Vincent replies as if he’s been listening for Sephiroth’s question.

“No—Chaos didn’t attack him back then, they don’t remember that. I don’t—he and Lucrecia were trying to investigate an area where there’d been a reported appearance of Chaos, but they weren’t trying to summon them,” Vincent says. He also sounds as if he’s answered this question before, but not in the way of a well-practiced alibi. “That wasn’t here.”

Or he sounds as if he’s asked this question before, and been told this answer, but that he doesn’t fully believe it himself. “Are his scars from the accident, or from later? He said they were due to Chaos exposure, and they look like my arm.”

“No, they don’t. I’d know,” Vincent mutters.

“Would you? Do you often make a habit of inspecting your father these days?” Sephiroth says.

With intentional malice, and so he takes the sudden flickering of the lights as a good sign. But nothing else happens. He doesn’t even catch a hint of any noises except for his own rough breathing.

His throat still hurts. He swallows, then grimaces as that only seems to intensify the sting. He may…he may have to tell Valentine something, to bring himself to at least ask the man to leave extra water and food, or to bring him another Cure Potion. All that vaunted superiority Hojo liked to claim, all those ideas that he’d distilled down into Sephiroth only the most flawless attributes, and of course he was wrong. The man had always been wrong, Sephiroth thinks with a sneer, and if he’d guessed that Chaos was the antidote to Jenova, then of course he also would try to simply cover that up rather than actually investigate the how and why.

“You don’t know?”

Sephiroth lifts his head—he’s half-asleep again, even his resentment too weak to resist physical frailty—and then startles as he sees Vincent right up against the opposite bars. “Do you think I’m merely entertaining myself here?”

Vincent stares at him in silence. Once Sephiroth calms himself, he pulls over the wristwatch—Vincent doesn’t so much as flick an eyelash—and checks the time, and this goes on for at least a minute.

“I know what I’ve been told—only what I’ve been told, whether it’s you or your father or my mother—some sources I trust a little more than others, but they’re all external sources,” Sephiroth finally adds. He fingers the wristwatch, then pushes it aside and tugs his arm under his head. If the man is going to stare, that at least is something Sephiroth is accustomed to bearing up under. “All I can personally say is you don’t seem to have a single scar but your father does. And he was never exposed to Jenova like I was…was he?”

Vincent puts his hand up. His left hand, and that plating on it doesn’t merely look metallic, since when it knocks against the bar, it lets out a tinny, echoing ring. His expression scrunches and he glances almost childishly at his hand, as if he’d somehow forgotten about the bars. He’s still staring at that when he speaks. “I thought you all—she’s one mind, she moves like one mind. You’re…different.”

“I think we’ve established that,” Sephiroth mutters, squinting at the other man. He has to work to keep his eyes open, but something in Vincent’s tone convinces him this isn’t merely mentally-disturbed musings. “Your father’s work doesn’t have much about Jenova in it.”

“That was Hojo’s area,” Vincent says. He puts his hand back against the bars, but carefully this time, so it doesn’t clank again. He still is looking at it. “Lucrecia learned a little when she was there, but he was paranoid and she wasn’t ever sure how much she had—if it wasn’t just left out for her to find…”

Which is a fair assessment given how Hojo works, Sephiroth thinks but doesn’t say. His throat hurts too much, and at this point, either Vincent is going to say something interesting or he won’t. He doesn’t seem to respond to provocation in predictable ways and Sephiroth can’t afford to keep trying an unreliable tactic.

“Father’s trying,” Vincent says. Like before, that infuriating—but Sephiroth stops in the middle of his returning outrage and looks harder at the other man, at the way Vincent keeps staring at him. “Hojo tried to get at him. Hojo tried. It didn’t kill him, but when I came back—he is my father. I can’t kill him.”

Sephiroth frowns. Then he glances around the room, a reflex from long years not only evading R&D’s monitoring but that of dozens of other factions within Shinra. The room is too bare for any kind of technical means of recording, he thinks, but then they’re dealing with other forces too. “I think I’ve seen things out of her—of Jenova’s eyes sometimes. Being buried somewhere,” he says after a moment’s furious calculations. “I’m curious, is that how Chaos sees the world through you?”

Vincent twists his head to the side and then down, his face spasming. It’s not quite a prelude to a transformation but Sephiroth does have fleeting sensations of more people in the room—no, more presence. “No, we’re one, we’re not—Chaos never—where do you think she is?”

“What?” Sephiroth says without thinking. “Probably still in Nibelheim, if anywhere—I know she’s not in Midgar, I’ve been into every nook and cranny, but he’s never let me go there and I know—”

“No. No, where did you see?” Vincent snarls. His voice drops unnaturally low and it makes Sephiroth’s skin prickle, but he still appears to be fighting to speak, not fighting himself. “She—I can’t see her, I can’t see either of them. I can’t kill him so long as he’s my father and I can’t see where she went—I can taste her in you but Chaos never, I never bit him, Sephiroth, I never—she wouldn’t let me. She kept me from that but then she went with him…and I can’t see her now. But I thought you could. The others, they could see each other. It was the same scream they all made, her scream, when I killed them. And you said something when I bit you—you called out like she did, not like them.”

“Who are we talking about?” Sephiroth asks sharply. “Jenova? Who el—wait. Are you talking about my mo—”

Vincent pivots around to stare at the door, then pivots the other way—and then he’s whisked himself across the gap and back into his corner. Sephiroth has gotten himself half onto his arms, but by then Vincent has cloaked himself and further efforts that way would be futile.

So he turns to the door instead. He waits, and waits, and then impatiently picks up the wristwatch to check the time. He only just puts it down again when Valentine’s step becomes audible.

Vincent’s heartbeat also reaches his ear. Just for the few seconds before the lock on the door starts to click, but Sephiroth notes that. And then he arranges himself on the pad, with all the papers around him and all his questions reorganizing themselves in his head, and prepares to meet Valentine.

Chapter 11: Present

Eleanor takes Zack and Cloud into a tiny breakroom at the back of the bar. It looks like a later add-on and one outside wall is actually just a piece of sheet metal that unclips and can get slid to the side when the weather is nice. “Gets so hot off the kitchen you can practically fry an extra plate off it sometimes,” she says with a nod to the shared wall. “Of course, it’s not so good in winter, but the men usually come around and tack down some insulation. But you don’t want to plug up everything or else it doesn’t let the gasses out.”

She’s smiling and obviously doing her best to be friendly, even competing with Cloud to bus a couple crumbs off the one spindly folding table, but she’s also definitely nervous about something. They did walk by the kitchen and she waved to the cook, so it doesn’t seem like it’s about being seen talking privately to Zack and Cloud. “Well, we’re all-weather SOLDIERs, and anyway today’s pretty good. I’ve had shifts above the Plate that had a way worse view than this,” Zack says, nodding at the sun peeking out just above the steep rocks the bar backs up against. “We just appreciate you taking the time to help out with our investigation.”

“Nobody wants to see more people die. The ones who did—they weren’t from this part of town, but Corel’s not that big. You don’t want to see that happen to anyone…” Eleaner’s smile cracks a little, and then she sighs and sits down at the table. She twists her fingers together as Zack and Cloud pull up seats. “I promised I’d tell you about Dr. Valentine. I should say—this is just the ghost story that I heard. I think there were a couple, but after the new Chief Engineer came, she really cracked down on the gossip and people stopped telling them.”

“That’s fine,” Zack says encouragingly. “Just tell us what you know.”

He nudges Cloud under the table. Cloud has his phone out and Zack knows he takes notes on that, and normally that’s fine. But Eleanor is skittish enough already and Zack doesn’t want her rethinking her choice to talk to them, so he tugs Cloud’s arm down till the phone is just under the table’s edge. Cloud seems to get what he means and gives Eleanor a quick apologetic tip of the head.

She sees him, but she doesn’t really pay attention. She’s busy trying to pick her words. “He was married, we all knew that—he wore a ring and had a couple family photos in his office, and he was very handsome. Well, I heard that—I’m the youngest of eight, and my older sisters would talk about him,” Eleanor starts. She flushes a little and stammers, almost like she’s going to change the topic…but then just doubles down. “But we never, ever saw his wife. At first nobody mentioned it because people transfer in all the time without bringing their families along, especially if it’s a short contract. But he kept getting his renewals, I guess, and then we started wondering. Then his son came to visit and, well, that really made people wonder since we didn’t realize how old Dr. Valentine actually was.”

“So his son was an adult?” Zack says. “I take it he didn’t live here?”

Eleanor flushes again. This time she straightens a little, like her embarrassment doesn’t completely cover whatever fun memory she’s having. “Yes. He worked for Shinra too, but I think he came from Midgar or one of the big cities and he wasn’t that friendly and only came a couple times before Dr. Valentine’s accident, but he was—my eldest sister had a part-time job managing records in the office and she had such a crush on him…even after he left, she was talking about him and she wormed her way into Dr. Valentine’s office and asked him a few things, and that’s how we found out his wife was actually dead.”

She doesn’t say it like the revelation had been especially creepy, but she pauses a little and looks at Zack as if he might. “So…he’d been acting like she wasn’t?”

“I wouldn’t say—I mean, I never spoke to him myself, but that’s not what…people didn’t talk about him like that. It just…it made people think a little differently about him,” Eleanor says. Her flush is gone and she’s twisting her fingers a little bit. “He obviously missed her, because he still had his ring, and hadn’t said anything, and I think maybe that’s how the ghost stories started.”

“Makes sense,” Zack says encouragingly. “Did anybody ever find out how his wife died?”

“No, I don’t think so—there were rumors but they were all so different that to be honest I didn’t believe any of them. And my sister was so embarrassed that she just excused herself as quick as she could, and avoided him after that, though I don’t think he ever made out that he was upset about it,” Eleanor replies. She pauses again as if searching her memory, but then firmly shakes her head. “No, I think we just knew that she’d died, and that it’d been a long time ago, nowhere near Corel.”

“What did she look like?” Cloud asks. Then hunches his shoulders when they both look at him. “You, uh, said he had family photos.”

Eleanor blinks as if she’d forgotten already. “Oh, yes, I heard that, but I didn’t see…no, I think Mary did tell me she was very beautiful, and looked a lot like Vincent—that was the son. Also that she didn’t look like she was from around here, though I don’t know exactly what that means.”

Zack assumes that Cloud is asking to help come up with better searches for Dr. Valentine in the records, since otherwise it sounds like this woman died way before anything they’re looking into happened. He gets that, but he also is aware that the bar isn’t closed and he wants to get the whole story out of Eleanor before they’re interrupted. “Okay, so is the ghost story about her? Did people start seeing her?”

“No, it wasn’t like that. It was—Dr. Valentine liked to hunt, and so he would go out late in the evening,” Eleanor explains. Her fingers untwist and scratch mindlessly at the table, but then she catches herself. She hastily pulls one hand down under the table and uses the other to nervously brush the hair from her face. “He’d go to where you’d think to—where other people go hunting too. There are some spots everybody knows are good hunting, and they’re all pretty far out of town. It’s an entire day to get out there, if not an overnight camping trip. So that was normal. But then he started staying closer to town, going up around some of the old mining works instead.”

“I’m guessing you don’t hunt there because of the toxic gases and chemicals? That’s going to spoil your meal for sure,” Zack says.

Cloud makes a tiny little sigh next to him, but Eleanor seems to appreciate the joke and smiles. “Well, that, and a lot of times they didn’t fill things up all the way, and so things are unstable—sinkholes open up, and there are cave-ins, things like that. The hunting isn’t very good this close either, because you can hear the active tunnels and the noise bothers the animals.”

Zack nods. “Yeah, right. So Dr. Valentine’s wandering around and it’s a little weird, and people start wondering what he’s doing because it doesn’t seem like he’s just hunting anymore, I’m guessing.”

“He was still showing up to work, and as far as anybody knew, doing a good job. It’s not like you can’t do what you want in your free time, so long as you do that much,” Eleaner says with just a little touch of defensiveness. Not that Zack wants to pry into anyone’s marriage—anyway, aside from the lack of useful facts, Dyne seemed okay—but Eleanor clearly still has a soft spot for Dr. Valentine. “But…yes, and he was going out more often, and this was just after he'd finally recovered from his accident too.”

That’s the second time she’s mentioned an accident. There are mines and while this is the first time Zack has actually been to Corel, he’s had to review enough reports involving the place to know everybody gets into an accident sooner or later. But this one sounds a bit worse than usual, and if it was bad enough, it should have gotten logged somewhere. “What happened? In this accident?”

“Oh,” Cloud says, like he’s got more to say, but then he doesn’t. Actually, he looks a little startled that they’re looking at him again, and Zack detects some under-the-table shifting that means Cloud was probably doing a bit more on his phone than just taking notes. “Sorry. I…”

“Cloud’s just been trying to see what we already have in the records so we don’t have to bother people asking when we don’t need to,” Zack fills in, while patting Cloud on the shoulder. “You got a hit?”

“Just that Dr. Valentine got put on sick leave for three months,” Cloud mutters, staring at the table. He chews his lip a little bit. “Then he was back, but then he took almost another month about ten months later.”

“I think that’s right. I wasn’t old enough to know myself, but that’s what people said later.” Eleanor’s not mad at sharing her storyteller duties, and if anything, seems relieved to have someone else confirming the facts. “The first time he was doing some research inside one of the old shafts—it was official, they’d opened it up for him, he wasn’t just poking his nose in there without telling anyone.”

Then it definitely has to be in the logs. Even if they can’t get hold of the R&D files, it sounds like it’d be in the mining operations records somewhere. “Cave-in?”

“Something like that,” Eleanor says. She’s being a little cautious again. “It was research, so it was top-secret and I don’t think people really knew. But he was very hurt and I think they thought he might die—his son came to visit and stayed almost a week.”

“Your sister must have been excited. I mean, I’m sure she was sad about how it happened—”

Eleanor smiles wryly. “Oh, no, she was excited. She still talked about it years later. Anyway, Dr. Valentine did get better, but I think everyone thought he was never quite the same after that.”

“You mean his health? Or how he acted?” Zack asks.

“He went back to work full-time once he got out of the clinic, but I remember someone saying they were always checking that he wasn’t about to faint on them, whenever he went into the mines to help the engineers,” Eleanor says. She shrugs. “But he could still hunt and get himself home. I guess hunting a bit closer might’ve been easier even if the game wasn’t as good, but…then the second time, he didn’t go into the clinic. They said it was probably a relapse but since he didn’t go in, I don’t think anyone knew for certain.”

“You mean the second time he went on sick leave,” Zack says.

She nods slowly. “He wasn’t…so sick that time that he couldn’t go out. People said they saw him going out, carrying his guns like he was hunting, but if he caught anything, he didn’t share it around. And he didn’t go to the clinic but he was asking for supplies—for drugs and other things and if he needed all that, he really must have been sick.”

Zack can think of a couple other explanations for that, and from the way Eleanor’s tone has turned uncertain, she might be doing the same. But he doesn’t go down those roads now and just tries to keep her on their current one. “Got it. So the ghost…”

“That started coming up around then. Because he was going out and you do usually go out to hunt at dawn or dusk—oh, I’m sorry, you probably know that already,” Eleanor says, with both hands back on the table to fidget again. “Anyway, he got better but he still was going out at night around the old mines, and people started saying they heard…screaming, crying, horrible noises, but there wasn’t anyone else with him. But they said he always looked—nobody thought he was faking being sick, put it that way.”

“Still a weird illness if you can go hiking in the mountains,” Zack mutters, but then he puts on a sympathetic face. Eleanor is so tense now that if somebody stomped in the next room, she’d probably jump off her chair, and something tells Zack she hasn’t told them everything yet. “Well, all right, if he really missed his wife and then had a traumatic accident, I can see how he might start up with seances.”

But Eleanor blinks as if that connection hadn’t even occurred to her. She starts to shake her head, pauses, and then finishes the shake. “No, no, the seances came a lot later—back then people just thought that Dr. Valentine was haunted, not the mines. Oh—sorry, I see where you—no, he was going out at night, and people saw him, and then he’d come back home and people would hear things, but when they went to check on him, he was always alone.”

“Oh,” Zack says. And he almost adds that that makes even less sense, but he’s getting ahead of himself, even before Cloud steps on his foot in warning. He’s getting frustrated at how many unknowns they’re running into, but that shouldn’t be keeping him from listening to her. He’s here for the truth, not for a fight.

And she does seem to want to tell this to them as straight as she can, despite being nervous. “But he was a very nice man, so no one wanted to really…and maybe this was just his way of dealing with what’d happened to him. He still did his job, and people…the engineers especially didn’t want to lose him. The Chief Engineer back then liked him, and that meant a lot—so this just went on for years, but then the poor man died and nobody really seemed to know what to do. The Chief Engineer died, I mean. They sent somebody out from Midgar to take a look and eventually a new Chief Engineer was appointed, but I remember it was all very confusing for a while.”

“This was Public Security,” Cloud says, more to Zack than to Eleanor. Then he follows up with a poke at Zack’s foot. “Right? They sent an officer?”

“I don’t know for sure, I just know it was some bigwigs. They sent a lot of people who worked in the office home for the week—they do that sometimes, when they’re afraid it’s going to get them in trouble.” Interestingly, Eleanor seems a bit more comfortable talking about this than her ghost stories. She even gives Zack a little conspiratorial smile, which he returns because honestly, all the regional offices do that, and also he does that with Cloud whenever they hear Hollander’s dropping by. “And before you say this sounds like I’m getting away from the story, I’m bringing this up because this is about when me and my friends went looking for ghosts. I don’t think we would’ve done it otherwise, but people were running around worried the mines would get shut down or handed over or all these awful things, and since our parents were all out in that, my sister, the one with the crush on him, she was watching us. And one night she said she thought she saw him.”

Zack tilts his head. “The son—Vincent? Or Dr. Valentine?”

“Vincent,” Eleanor says firmly. Then she laughs a little, uncomfortable and low but still with that genuine ring of someone thinking back to simpler times. “We all thought she was just being obsessed, but she swore she saw not just him but him with Dr. Valentine and a woman—a young woman, but then his wife had looked young in the photos and that was what we thought by then, that she’d died young. And we hadn’t seen Vincent in years so she had this idea Vincent and she were both dead and were haunting Dr. Valentine, trying to get him to go with them.”

“Yeah, that sounds creepy,” Zack says. “So was this out by the mines, or…”

“By the mines,” Eleanor tells them. When Cloud coughs and then pulls his phone up to show a map, she hesitates a little, saying they knew they didn’t have authorization to be in that area and some of her friends are still alive. It takes some coaxing and promises to not name names, but Zack manages to get her to point to where on the map. “We weren’t going there to call up any ghosts, that’s the difference between then and now. We thought the ghosts were already there and we just wanted—if Dr. Valentine was just going a little crazy, or was sick again, nobody wanted him to just fall down an old shaft and never get found again.”

The spot Eleanor points out is in the same sector where the seances have been happening, but from the way that Cloud’s brows pinch together, Zack guesses it’s still far enough off that things aren’t fitting perfectly together. He just stops himself from asking the man about that because they have to finish up with Eleanor here. “So what happened?”

“Oh, nothing.” Then Eleanor startles, her eyes widening. But she’s still looking at them—Zack glances right behind them, just in case, but that’s just the wall. When he looks back, Eleanor is flushing in embarrassment again. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but really…we followed Dr. Valentine out there and he walked around a little, looking at the stars, and then he went back to his place, and nothing strange at all happened. He just looked so sad about something—if we’d been running on sense instead of spooks, we should’ve asked him if he was all right, but we didn’t, and he just went inside without seeing us.”

“Huh.” Disappointing, but then again, Eleanor is alive and well and even if she disagrees with her husband on telling ghost stories, she doesn’t exactly seem haunted herself. If something had happened to her back then, Zack wouldn’t be talking to her today. “Well, still, I really appreciate you sharing your story with us. Every little detail might be helpful—we’re still in the early stages here and the easiest way to miss things is to not even bother to look for them.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad I could do anything at all that might help you save people,” Eleanor says. She still looks a little downcast, like she thinks she could’ve done better, but also like she’s glad to have this out in the air. “It was just a stupid ghost story about a sad lonely man, probably, but…anyway, I need to get back out front, and Dyne and Barret will probably be back soon for you.”

“Of course,” Zack says, getting out of her way.

Cloud gets up too but he lifts his hand as Eleanor starts to move past him. “Sorry, just…want to make sure I have this right. So did anybody see him after that?”

“Sorry?” Eleanor says, blinking at him.

“It’s just—he ended up leaving, right? Dr. Valentine? Do you remember when it was, how long after you and your friends saw him?” Cloud asks.

“Oh. Oh, right, he…I’m not sure, honestly. The Midgar people were here and they locked down almost everything except core operations for a few days, and then they all left—it was so confusing,” Eleanor says. She clearly still isn’t sure what Cloud is getting at, but to Zack’s eye she’s not trying to be defensive about it and is just trying to figure out what of her memories could possibly be helpful here. “I think—I mean, I thought Dr. Valentine just went with the Midgar team. He did shut down his lab here, but when that was—it was the last time we saw him, but we were going out to look for him that night. It wasn’t like we normally followed him around, because even my sister stopped doing that when—”

“She was embarrassed about getting him to tell her his wife was dead in the first place. Right, we got that. That’s helpful, thanks,” Zack says. He can tell Eleanor’s getting flustered now, and he’d rather not have her go back out into the bar that way. “Right, Spike?”

Cloud grimaces and dips his head, muttering a thanks and nice to meet you. He does glance up when Eleanor gives him a tentative smile, but doesn’t exactly look friendly as she makes her way out.

“Not that we all have to be balls of sunshine, Spike, but she was just nervous she was wasting our time,” Zack says. Barret and Dyne aren’t back yet, and it’s actually nicer in this breakroom than the bar, so they’re back sitting at the table. “Anyway, I think no harm done, we’ll just take you to practice your fun face in Sector Seven when we get back, and so what are you thinking?”

It takes a couple seconds for Cloud to answer. Not because he’s not listening but because he is, and no matter how many times Angeal or Genesis or others tell him to just ignore half of what comes out of Zack’s mouth, he ignores them instead, bless his dutiful little heart. “That yeah, she’s telling what she knows, but this all seems like a lot for the people around here to ignore. I’m pretty sure Dr. Valentine didn’t transfer to Midgar.”

“No, I think we would’ve heard something. At least a Hollander rant about misused funds or old fogies or something like that,” Zack says, sobering. He does agree with Cloud, the more they find out, the more improbable it seems that everyone just wrote things off as personal issues and politics and probably some typical Shinra fuck-ups somewhere in there. “At minimum, with Heidegger in town and a vanished early-run SOLDIER, I’d think that this Dr. Valentine probably ended up in the mines. In a good or bad way, we can’t…but is there a good way to end up in the mines?”

“I don’t think that’s it either,” Cloud mutters. He taps at his phone, then puts it between them on the table. “Look, this is where the victims went for their séance. Then this over here, this is where Eleanor said she and her friends went. And then this last cluster, this is the mine that was acting up when Sephiroth had his mission.”

He’s using a topographical map, not one that shows the underground, but the relative distances alone tell the story. The first two aren’t that far apart, and given the crazy patchwork of tunnels running everywhere in Corel, Zack could easily believe there’s some kind of connector. The last one, on the other hand, is half a mile up the mountainside from the other two as the crow flies, which means for foot-sloggers it’s a hell of a hike. Of course you don’t expect physics to apply to ghosts, but Zack still isn’t convinced there’s not just some nasty human machinations at the bottom of all of this.

So Eleanor’s story might not be related to Sephiroth…but as Zack thinks it over, that doesn’t seem right either. “I think we’re gonna have another late night, Spike,” he says. “I know you’ve been hounding Records with everything you got, but we need to track down at least some of these names.”

Cloud nods. “I think some of it’ll come back by the time we’re back at quarters,” he says. “Maybe the check on the mine, so we can work out exactly what brought Heidegger and Sephiroth here.”

“Oh, go—” Zack starts, but then he hears Barret and Dyne’s voices out front. So he just gives Cloud a quick clap on the shoulder as he gets up.

Unfortunately, they have bad news for him. The tour won’t be happening today, since they hit a gas pocket and so far haven’t been able to find a way to plug it. The gas readings are also bad enough that they don’t think their available masks can take it.

“I don’t want to tell you what you boys can or can’t do, but I’m just saying I would be killing my team to send them down without oxygen tanks, and even then I think I’d be lying to their families to say that’ll take care of them,” Dyne says. He obviously feels bad about it, but at the same time he’s got a set to his shoulders and chin as if expecting an uppercut or something like that. “We’re working on it, and I think it’s resolvable. I just don’t think it’ll be today—I can update first thing tomorrow with a solid ETA.”

He shows Zack the readings and it’s hard to disagree. Zack thinks he could probably make it, but he’d want to go in with a clear goal and a clear time window for achieving it, neither of which makes sense for an investigatory walk-through. Cloud definitely wouldn’t be able to, since he’s still just a Second and has two phases of enhancements to go before he can qualify for a First. “Yeah, I get it,” Zack says.

“You want to just go around the outside, that’s no problem,” Barret says. He’s giving Dyne a shoulder-squeeze at the same time, which combined with Zack’s comment seems to put Dyne at ease. “Just to not waste the trip.”

“Nah, let’s do it all at once. Besides, it wasn’t a waste, we at least got to have lunch out here and not back at the company canteen,” Zack says.

That definitely goes over well with both men. Barret even goes so far as to call out the cook and insist on to-go packages for Zack and Cloud, since per him, they can’t reschedule the walk-through if the canteen poisons them. They chat through a few more logistics while waiting for that, and then Zack and Cloud head back into town.

By the time they get there, it’s almost the end of the workday. Cloud peels off to go find one of the few SOLDIER-secured terminals and check on his queries while Zack takes the food back to their quarters. His plan is just to drop that off and then find Cissnei, since he assumes she’s probably wrapping up interviews, but he ends up running into her in the hall between their rooms.

“You’re back?” she says with lifted brows.

“Same?” Zack says, but then softens it with a smile. “Also, got carryout that’s way better than the cafeteria casserole, if you’re interested.”

Cissnei’s eyes flick around them and then she starts to ask where Cloud is. She seems a little nervous, which does make Zack eye her because a Turk seeming a little nervous is not a common tell and usually not for a fun reason. But then she huffs out a breath like she’s just had a rough day and says she’ll take some of the food.

So Zack goes back to his and Cloud’s room to get it and Cissnei comes with him. “Did you go into the cave?” she asks once they’re inside and the door is shut.

“No, it’s gassing out first so we had to reschedule,” Zack says. He’d also stopped by the cafeteria to swipe some utensils, since the bar hadn’t had any disposable ones, but for some reason he didn’t put them with the food and now he can’t spot them. “Just collected some ghost stories, we’ll share when we get back to your—”

“Do you still have the rental car?” Cissnei asks.

Zack pivots from where he’s checking behind his duffel in case the utensils fell back there. “Got it for the week,” he says. “What’s up?”

“Not a hit and run,” she says dryly, guessing the exact first thought that jumps to mind. “But I’ve been in this place all day and thinking it’d be nice to eat outside of it, especially if we don’t have to get the cafeteria food.”

“Well, sure, though if you’ve got a spot in mind, that would help. We weren’t scouting picnic spots on the way or anything,” Zack says. He starts to turn back and then glimpses a corner of the napkins he’d wrapped the utensils in, sticking out from the back of the trashcan. After a quick victory pump, he pushes that aside, retrieves the bundle, checks it for usability and then sticks it in his pocket. “Also need to swing by the comms room to grab Cloud. He thought we’re supposed to go meet in front of your door.”

Cissnei cocks her head oddly at Zack, but doesn’t offer any objections so they do that. Cloud’s on a call when they walk in but he ends it as soon as he sees them, and he’s on board with the outdoor picnic plan too. They all get into the rental and then Cissnei directs them to a parking garage a couple blocks away, which is just tall enough so that if you park on the very top level, you can see a sliver of woods between the roofs and the low-hanging haze.

“Were you calling Midgar?” Cissnei asks as they’re dividing up the food.

That’s to Cloud, who blinks hard, looks at Zack, and then, before Zack can save him, nods. “Yeah, but the phone is ours.”

“It’s the secure comms room,” Zack points out. “The whole point is no tapped lines.”

“He was on his cell,” Cissnei responds, but she’s more thoughtful than accusing about it. She’s also not refraining from digging into the food as if she hasn’t had anything to eat all day. “Look, I’m just saying, we should…did you—”

“Yeah, Cloud here is up to speed and also my auxiliary brain, so anything you tell me gets backed up to him,” Zack sighs. He’s starting to think that the little bit of thawing out was just being stuck on a long-haul flight together. “This about Heidegger?”

Cissnei purses her lips a few times. Then she pulls her phone out, checks something in it, and shoves it back into her pocket. “Yeah,” she says shortly. “We lost him.”

“Then he did do a runner?” Zack says. To be honest, part of him still thought Heidegger might turn up in some back-alley or sleazy hotel room back in Midgar. Not that he thinks the Turks are incompetent—they’re usually not, they just usually aren’t aiming the same way as SOLDIER—or that he was ever rooting for Heidegger, but that would’ve been more like the guy. “That’s such an idiot thing to do. It was only a matter of time before somebody noticed and even he can’t just wave off something like that.”

Cloud had stuck his fork in his food as soon as Cissnei spoke, and now he’s staring intently at her. “Where?”

“On this side—we think it’s on this side of the water,” Cissnei says. She’s glaring at her food now, and even though Zack can hear her stomach still grumbling for more, isn’t eating it. “Rude tracked him to a private airstrip but couldn’t stop the plane. But it was on radar the whole way, and when it landed I was there but Heidegger wasn’t on it.”

The meal is really good, and now Zack has to stop eating so he can take his phone out and message Angeal because this is the kind of update that can’t wait. Which is just another way that Heidegger somehow manages to be the worst kind of annoyance. “Before or after us? We could’ve gotten more than radar and picked up a parach—”

“He didn’t parachute out, Zack. Rude’s not dumb—he got hold of the pilot and told him to keep Heidegger in there. We just let the plane go all the way because it was going to be less drama if we got him on this side,” Cissnei says sharply. Then she curses and grabs at her fork and the plastic lid she’s using for a plate, just keeping them from flipping off her lap; she’d started to twist her hand without thinking. “I watched it land and got up the stairs to open the door and there’s no sign of Heidegger at all. And Rude watched him get into the plane.”

Something about this has Cissnei rattled, not just furious at being tricked, and Zack is starting to get that creepy feeling again. “What about the pilot?”

“Dead,” Cissnei says. She has the lid steady again and is holding it with both hands. “He was answering the radio all the way to landing, so I don’t know.”

They sit with that for a second, and then Cissnei shakes herself. It looks like it starts off as a shudder but then she gets irritated and manages to redo it. She picks up her fork, then grimaces and puts it back down.

“So did you have any interviews, or was it just going to this airstrip?” Zack asks.

A snort escapes Cissnei. She takes up her fork again and this time sticks it into her food, a little rough but not so much that Zack thinks she’s imagining it going into anyone. “Fair, seriously. You cannot be this…this much of a…you really think we’re all here just because of a ghost?”

“Hey, listen, I get my orders and I carry them out. And this time I’m here figuring out what is going on and why people are dying and how do we stop that,” Zack says. He’s trying not to be too impatient since she does seem genuinely rattled, but…dead bodies. Dead Heidegger. They have to get into that. “What seems wrong with that?”

She looks up at him and he can still see a little residual shakiness in there, but she’s mostly back to herself now. “Nothing, I guess. Just nice for you two to get to ignore where…never mind. No, I didn’t have interviews. Tseng was just trying to do you all a solid and keep you out of the Heidegger takedown while the border’s blowing up, but I talked to him and that’s off the table now.”

Also so he can have the Turks take the credit for rooting out a traitor, because Zack isn’t that naïve, but for now he lets that go since they’re getting down to business. “Yeah, so this airstrip and this new body—”

“Yes, I’m going to let you look it all over. And don’t worry, it’s still a pretty pristine site—didn’t do a full check myself yet, just shut it down and came back here to report it on a secure line.” Cissnei sighs and then eats a mouthful. She chews it, looking at the view past Zack’s shoulder, and then shifts her gaze to him. “I just thought maybe we could get in a meal first, because I’m actually not the kind who likes to eat around a dead body but maybe they build you differently when they’re adding on those muscles.”

“The muscles are courtesy of the Zack Fair patented weight-room routine, thank you, and I’m fine to finish eating too. I’m just surprised you’re taking a beat if Heidegger’s still on the run,” Zack responds.

“Well, I don’t know about that. There just wasn’t enough time…and I locked it down tight, believe me,” Cissnei mutters. She seems to go back and forth about what else to say for a couple minutes, then decides. “Look, Tseng said he’d already let Rhapsodos know, but I’m not going to stop you if you want to skip dinner. You’re just going to have to wait in front of the hangar till I get there, because I want to finish this and I’ve got the only key.”

Zack laughs because her mulish expression as she does that is honestly funny, but it’s not like he hasn’t been thinking through all the consequences while they’ve been chatting. If Cissnei came back here to find them, she must think Heidegger’s not actually that dangerous, wherever he is right now…and there’s also probably something she hasn’t told them yet but wants to let them see for themselves. So good and not good, and either way Zack’s going to do better on it if he can finish his dinner first.

Cloud looks antsy and starts just picking at his food while giving Zack looks, so when Zack’s container is empty, he passes it to the other man and asks him to go find the trashcan. But Zack stays with Cissnei on the excuse that the food is gone but the drink is not, and the bar had graciously given them a six-pack to take back with them too, which is hospitality if Zack’s ever seen it. And even if alcohol does nothing to post-enhancements him, he could use a little of that before they go see another dead body…and maybe it’ll soften Cissnei up. It’s a long shot but she had had that pepper greens moment in the cafeteria, after all.

“I’m really not lying about Tseng talking to your leadership,” Cissnei says, nodding in the direction Cloud went. She’s on her last bites of food and wasn’t exactly lagging after Zack, but now she seems to be debating if she really wants to tackle the home stretch. “If they’re not telling you, it’s not because we asked for that.”

“Look, truce, okay? We both need to track down Heidegger first, and then deciding who let him turn into some kind of flying super-mole is above my pay grade,” Zack tells her. Then he tips the last of the beer into his mouth, enjoying the slight fizz on his tongue; even without a buzz, the taste is definitely better than the tap water here. “I’m not sending Cloud to whine about you. He’s got his own stuff, first of all.”

That makes Cissnei look a little strangely at him, and sometimes Zack just…wishes that it was easier to talk to people without having to wonder if he’s accidentally referenced some top-secret bullshit from years ago. He’s a lot better about catching onto that than he was when he first got into SOLDIER, but every so often he still stubs a toe and kicks up an undisclosed mission. Though he’s pretty sure Cloud can’t be the source of any of that. He’s known the kid since practically initial recruitment, and Cloud stays well away from all of the politics.

“Okay, fine,” Cissnei suddenly says, shrugging as a prelude to a subject change. “So while we’re waiting for him, anything helpful on your end? We’re still not sure what Heidegger wants to do in Corel, if he did make it here.”

Zack almost points out that a few minutes ago Cissnei was dead certain the man had made it over, but decides he can’t do that in any way that seems like a ‘gotcha.’ Even if personally, he’s definitely reserving judgment till he sees the plane about where the manhunt needs to be, since that would be the easier explanation, slamming Rude’s rep and all. “Well, like I said, couple ghost stories. Apparently they’ve had them for a while, and not just about SOLDIER. There was this R&D scientist stationed here with a conveniently and tragically dead young wife, Valentine…yep?”

Cissnei briefly looks pissed with herself for giving away the recognition, but then she shrugs again. “Valentine was kind of a big deal family around here back in the day,” she says. “They named one of the mountains after them.”

“Well, I think this one wasn’t exactly fitting into the family legacy there, because he sounds like he was pretty low down on the ladder,” Zack says. “But they were telling stories about him around when Sephiroth disappeared so Cloud was going to look into it some more.”

“What were they saying?” Cissnei asks.

She seems genuinely curious about that and not curious because she’s testing Zack’s reactions. He gives her a brief rundown and adds in a couple more details about relative ages and timing that Cloud had worked out, based on personnel files for Eleanor’s family that are on the local intranet. When Zack mentions the son, Cissnei does that full-body pause again and then starts to reach for her phone.

Then she takes her hand away, but instead of pretending like nothing happened, she actually explains while washing down her last bits of food with the beer Zack handed her. “I think there was a guy named Valentine who was in the Turks at one point,” she says. “Just don’t run with this or have Cloud do that, okay? Because I’m not sure if he’s related at all—this would’ve been way before my time and maybe even Tseng’s time, and I just—I just heard the name as part of somebody else’s joke, way back when I first started, and they weren’t exactly—Tseng had them take early retirement not long after that, let’s put it that way.”

“Okay. I mean, I’m not sure what that means outside of the Turks, but I’m gonna assume from your face that it’s not down to merit,” Zack says. He watches her annoyance war with ongoing concern and decides he’ll toss her a life-saver, if only so she’s not thinking about it all through their post-dinner visit to the plane. “If Angeal asks, I can’t not tell him. And he can already see that we’re trying to get records on Valentine—on the R&D Valentine. But Turk Valentine isn’t verified yet and I’m not going to stretch that any further till I see more.”

Because of course he and Cloud going to keep looking into R&D Valentine no matter what she says, and if they are related, then it’s going to come up. From the way she nods, she gets that but wasn’t trying to head that off anyway. “Fine. And I’ll ask Rude when I get him back on. He overlapped more with that—with the one who told the joke, so maybe he can tell us if it’s true or not.”

Zack blinks in surprise.

“If Heidegger was messing with the Turks back then, we’re not going to let it go. And I already told you I need some help getting him,” Cissnei says, reading his face. “What, would SOLDIER do it different?”

“Nope,” Zack says, smiling at her. After she wipes off her mouth with a napkin, he holds his hand out to her and helps her to her feet. “So let’s look at this plane.”

Chapter 12: Present

They pick up Cloud on the way out of the garage, since he messages that he’s two floors down and still trying to find a trashcan. He’s actually on the phone when Zack pulls up, looking flustered and muttering apologies even though Zack’s the one who owes him one.

“It’s fine, we’ll just bag it and get rid of it when we get to the airstrip. They’ve gotta have a dumpster somewhere,” Zack says, sitting back from tipping the passenger door open for Cloud. “So was that Midgar? They get back to you on any of the outstanding stuff?”

Cloud pauses and blinks, then hauls himself into the front seat. “They’re asleep now, Zack.”

“Oh, right.” Stupid time zones. “I guess we technically can’t flag this for the IT emergency shift yet.”

“Not with a Level Four at the border,” Cloud says under his breath, not accusing, just like he’s noting that to himself because he was also thinking about whether they could get away with it. “So this airstrip is the one off the north highway, right?”

“Yeah, Cissnei can give you coordinates,” Zack says as he pulls the car out from the little bay where Cloud had been standing.

She obligingly leans forward and shows Cloud something on her phone. “Did somebody local call you?” she asks while she’s propped up there.

Zack glances at her, but then has to pay attention as he threads back onto the exit ramp, which even by Midgar standards seems to think cars bend like rubber. He does glimpse Cloud frowning at Cissnei, and it’s on the tip of his tongue to tell the man he doesn’t have to answer her.

“Just wondering if they’re wondering where we are,” Cissnei adds, obviously sensing how she’d come off to them.

“No. I just—got a voicemail earlier, was listening to it while I was waiting for you,” Cloud says, his voice getting lower and softer.

He had hung up right away without saying anything. And anyway Zack doesn’t know why Cissnei is poking at Cloud, because he and Zack hadn’t had anything scheduled with the locals and she almost seems like she thinks he was doing something behind their backs. Weird thing to worry about when their head of Public Security is AWOL with a potential murder or four on his record, Zack almost says.

“Okay,” Cissnei says, and then she pushes back into her seat. “So yeah, the airstrip’s technically within range for him to make it to the area you were going to tour, but I think the landscape is pretty rough.”

“There are a couple access roads,” Cloud says, voice back to normal volume. “But there’s no sign he left yet, right?”

“Well, we’re gonna see,” Cissnei says. Now she sounds like she’s back to chewing over the brewing mess at hand, and when she speaks again, it’s to ask Cloud if he’s got all the topographical maps on his phone.

The airstrip is about thirty minutes’ drive from the garage. From the discussion they have on the way, Cissnei seems to be backtracking on her initial freakout and considering more mundane explanations for Heidegger, but she still seems to think he actually made it across the water. Cloud gives her the more detailed version of the Dr. Valentine story, but shows how the locations aren’t really triangulating, so the two of them go back to concentrating on the shaft that’s currently at the center of all the ghost stories. She seems to think if Heidegger was going to head anywhere, it’d be to there.

“But look, I’m still not sure he got off the plane,” she cautions as they stand outside of the hangar where the plane has been parked. As she does, she takes out a gun and takes off the safety, though she points it down at the ground. “I didn’t check every nook and cranny. But it’s not that big.”

“Yep,” Zack nods, only half-listening to her. He gestures for Cloud to unsheathe his sword, but keeps his own on his back for now as he studies the building.

It’s not that big. The whole airstrip isn’t that big, and it’s pretty barebones; per Cloud, the narrow approach between the mountains on this side of Corel really limits the size of the planes that can land here, and it’s mostly used by tiny privately-owned ones, which in turn mostly belong to miners’ clubs who group-fund a shared plane. Corel has a decent contingent of people from the Northern Continent and while it’s technically a lot quicker to fly straight north from here, none of the commercial flights route that way. They don’t make enough money unless they go east through Costa del Sol or west to Rocket Town, hence the flight clubs.

Less space is better when it comes to corralling a fugitive, and the hangar itself does look solidly built. Once she saw the pilot, Cissnei got the airstrip operators to hook a tow line to the plane and drag it into the hangar, then padlocked all of the doors and had them stack heavy crates or park forklifts up against them for good measure. So she does seem fairly confident there’s been no external shenanigans since she left to get Zack and Cloud, even if she’s not so much about the plane’s contents.

“No security cameras inside, just on the outside,” she warns them. “But I was in there and there’s not really anything else but the plane. Some crates but they’re all along the wall, and they disconnected all the electrical.”

“Gas lines? Where do they refuel?” Zack asks.

“Across the way.” Cissnei nods in the other direction, then turns back to the hangar. “There are vents on the roof but they don’t normally open wide enough for a person to go through, and this is wide-open space all around. Hard to miss a runner.”

“Yeah. Yeah, and I heard the guard, I think they’ve been keeping an eye out,” Zack says.

He’s pretty sure that if anyone besides the pilot—Cissnei didn’t have them take out the body, just sealed it in the cabin—was on the plane, then they’re still there. But it is just past sunset now and it’s still an indoor environment, and even Heidegger can get lucky when you’re an idiot. So he sends Cloud up onto the roof to keep watch through one of the vents, and then he and Cissnei have the airstrip personnel unblock one of the doors.

There’s no way to do that quietly so whoever is in there knows they’re coming. Zack takes advantage of that by having Cloud set up lights on the roof powered by generators outside, so when the door opens, they step into a well-lit space.

It is a tiny plane, and only takes up about a third of the floor. It’s closer to the other side than to them, but doesn’t sit so low to the ground that there should be much room to hide behind it. Still, Zack and Cissnei flank out from each other, Cissnei staying behind just long enough to lock the door behind them, and round the plane from opposite sides.

Nothing. Not even a weird shadow, and Cloud is saying into Zack’s earpiece that it looks clear to him too. Zack signals to Cissnei and she comes over to him, gun and eyes fixed on the plane.

There are two doors on either side of the plane, but Zack can see a slumped-over form on one side of the cockpit that he guesses is the pilot, and that would make it hard for anyone to make a quick getaway from that side. Supposedly the plane isn’t actually a two-seater and there is a miniscule cabin behind it—he’d probably kick out holes in the walls if he had to fly in one of these—and he’s trying to figure out what is the best way to pop the door without giving anyone inside a free shot at him when Cissnei pokes his arm.

He glances at her, finger still covering the Ice materia in his sword-hilt, and she gestures towards the bottom of the plane where he can make out hinges for some kind of storage compartment. It doesn’t look anywhere near enough for somebody with Heidegger’s body shape, though Cloud might be able to squish in and Aerith definitely could hitch a ride. He nods agreement that they should take a look.

Since she has the range weapon, Cissnei backs off to where she can see both doors. Zack gets onto his knees and half-crawls, half-scuttles up to the tail of the plane, then works down to where he can get at the compartment. It was still decently warm outside, though cooling fast from the growing night wind, but in here it’s freezing and it feels as if he’s scrubbing himself across an iceberg.

Still, the job is the job. He tests the compartment and can tell by the way the panel creaks that it’s latched in two places. He definitely can break it open, but the panel isn’t moving enough for him to get fingertips in so he pulls out a smaller knife and sticks it into the gap. Then slides it around for the best leverage point.

Zack just thinks he has that when something makes him look from there out to where Cissnei is standing. He…doesn’t think that he heard anything, and it takes him a second to figure out what is wrong. All he can see of Cissnei are her legs but he can hear her breathing echo in the otherwise dead-silent hangar, and—

He swears and lunges up from the floor, flipping his blade around in one hand while twisting back on his foot to get ready to throw his knife. “Behind—”

Cissnei jerks, but to her credit, it’s not to move her gun to point at Zack’s face. She slews around, pivoting out of the way so that both of them can see where that other shadow should have a person making it, but—nothing.

Nothing? Zack saw that, he saw very clearly the silhouette of another pair of legs and there was even the line of a long coat—he slows but keeps on towards Cissnei. Once he’s clear of the plane, he wheels around to take in the rest of the hangar, including the cockpit where the dead pilot’s head is just—

“Zack,” crackles through the earpiece. “Zack, I’ve got eyes—I—shit I—over—”

Somebody else is in the cockpit, standing just behind the pilot’s seat and bending down so that they can look out. It’s bright enough that Zack should be able to make them out, and as confused as he is right now, he’s still a damn SOLDIER and he’s trained to deal with high-stress high-randomness situations—but he doesn’t get much. Even afterward, when they’ve regrouped, he can’t seem to get much out of his memory. It’s just like a staticky video where the noisy parts cut over the image.

Dark clothes, shiny shoulderguards he’s seen before in SOLDIER uniform archives. White above that, unnaturally white, unhealthily white—and eyes staring back at him, whispers all around them.

Then he’s staring at a spiderweb of cracks around the bullethole Cissnei’s just put in the windshield. Zack takes a sluggish step forward, then jumps to it and gets to the pilot-side door. “Cloud?” he snaps at the same time. “Cloud, talk to me. Where are you, do you have eyes?”

“Fair!” Cissnei snaps, just as the door they’d come through bangs open behind them.

She’s a stride back from him and he senses her wheeling around to deal with whatever it is, so he just brings his sword down on the door and gets that out of the way. Then he jams himself in, looking swiftly back and forth and determining that there’s no active…

He looks again. Then, cursing, he twists himself sideways so he can fit further inside. That means he can’t bring his sword around so he holds up his knife instead, but he already has a feeling that he won’t need to use it.

“…shoot you and it won’t be winging,” Cissnei is saying behind him. She pauses, then clears her throat. “Fair? You there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, me and a couple dead bodies,” Zack says, still staring into the cabin. Then he raises his hand as Cissnei inhales to ask. “Heidegger.”

“What?” She immediately tries to push by him, and when he doesn’t move, makes a frustrated noise. “Don’t joke with me, Zack, I looked—”

“Yeah, I know what you said and I’m not—I didn’t think you were lying back then and I’m not saying that now.” Zack shoulders her back, but then turns out of her way. But he grabs her arm as she goes past him. “He’s in there but he looks wrong.”

Cissnei gives him half a look. Only half because like a good fighter, she’s still got half an eye for the unknown ahead of her, but it’s still enough to let him know she’s as creeped out by the warning as understanding of it.

Then she goes into the plane. He sees her stiffen and hears her low suck of breath and backs out to where Cloud is looking almost as pale as the g—whatever in the cockpit. “Spike?”

“I don’t know—” Cloud visibly steadies himself “—someo—something flew over the hangar.”

From the way he says that, it wasn’t just some bird or bat distracting him. “Threat level?” Zack asks.

“I—not active, I don’t…it was going away from us. Away from town.” Cloud’s eyes drift to where Cissnei is now cursing softly. “Then I looked back inside and saw something jump out of the cockpit. But it—it didn’t touch the ground.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that,” Zack mutters. He starts to turn back to get Cissnei and talk lockdown.

But just as he does, that storage compartment he’d been trying to open does that on its own: the panel falls off with a deafening clang that makes Cloud and Zack both leap back into defensive positions. They’re not doing this right, Zack thinks as the backwind from Cloud’s blade sheers past him. This whole damned mission is not going right.

“What…” Cissnei clambers down from the plane, gun ready, and then she falters as they all see what’s in the compartment.

Nothing.

One of them breathes raggedly. Zack finds himself hiking his sword at the noise and catches himself. Then, fighting himself more than anything else, he clears his throat and waits out the other two till they’re done startling.

“Okay,” he says as calmly as he can. “We’re locking this down and figuring it out. That’s what we’re doing, right now. That’s what we’re going to do, figure this out.”

Chapter 13: Present

They do all get back on track with investigation protocol and that helps a little, but Zack still can’t help feeling like he’s just stretching duct tape over a pothole. The airstrip was already shut down for ordinary business and Zack calls into the Corel office to get enough manpower to make sure the hangar is isolated until future notice. He and Cloud check the existing security measures in the meantime, and while they’re not spectacular, they’re good enough that Zack does think nothing got by on the ground.

In the air is a different story, although the radar station here was operating and they didn’t pick up anything at the time that Cloud saw something. And he seems more and more doubtful about even admitting to seeing something the more that they ask him, even with Zack’s reassurances.

“Yeah, I know, but it just doesn’t make sense,” he keeps saying. He pauses in the middle of taping down his side of the tarp, then looks at Zack. “It did look like a pair of wings, but the wind’s going the other way. You can’t fly like that without an engine.”

“Okay, details first, logic later. Let’s not write the conclusion before we do the rest of the report,” Zack tells him.

That puts a hint of a smile on Cloud’s face—they’ve both heard that tons of times from Angeal—but it doesn’t last that long. “Yeah. I’ll put it in, but I keep thinking that wasn’t the—I think everything was really going on inside here, with you and Cissnei. That other thing I saw…”

Doesn’t actually make more sense, to be honest, but Zack doesn’t say that right now. His side is done, so he goes around the tarp, making sure to pat Cloud’s shoulder on the way, and then goes up into the plane.

Cissnei still has the camera in her hand, though she called that she was done with the photos a couple minutes ago. “I didn’t fucking see it,” she says. “Except how can you miss that?”

She means Heidegger’s corpse, which is still in the plane where Zack first saw it. Zack doesn’t think she’s actually looking for him to reassure her, so he just puts on his PPE. Corel is sending up their forensic pathologist in the morning and they’ve told Zack it’s better to pull both bodies out into the hangar for further examination since the plane is so damn small. No one wants to have to just peel back the steel like a can in case the bodies swell up or anything like that, and it’s already getting a little dicey with rigor mortis.

So Zack straightens his mask and gloves up—they don’t have a full biohazard suit but honestly, he’s going to be doing his best not to bearhug the damn corpses anyway—while Cissnei backs out of the way. He gets the pilot out first and that’s not that hard…and also lets him see that there aren’t any obvious bullet holes or knife wounds. But the pilot’s head does roll a little in a way that immediately says broken neck to him, and even if Heidegger normally made an assistant do anything more strenuous than lifting a pudgy finger, something like that technically wouldn’t be out of the man’s ability.

Though Zack would’ve expected the plane to be more bashed up in that case. He puts a few new dents in the walls getting the pilot out and that’s just because he can’t help having knees and elbows, and those are easy to pick out when Cissnei goes back in with the camera because the plane looks okay otherwise. It’s just…he pushes that away for now, trying to take his own advice to Cloud.

When Cissnei comes out again, Zack goes in for Heidegger. The man is face-down, lying like he started on the lone bench seat along the cabin wall and then sort of belly-flopped towards the floor without completely making it. His arm is still hooked over the top of the seat, while his legs are on the floor and are taking up all the space between the seat and some supply containers strapped along the opposite wall. None of those are anywhere near big enough to hold a person so Zack puts a foot on one as he bends over and unwedges Heidegger’s feet.

He gets those free, then heaves the body up onto the bench so it’s in a better position to thread back out through the doorway…and then stops. Eventually, Cissnei comes in to see what’s keeping him.

She immediately gets it. “Where is all the blood?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Zack says, still staring.

Heidegger’s been opened up like somebody wanted to butterfly him for the grill, a big slice from chin to groin. His insides started coming out once Zack got him up and Zack shoved them back in before stopping to stare, and there’s a little bit of smear on the floor from them but nowhere near enough for that kind of cut. The stain isn’t colored like blood either, it’s colored like internal fluids and Zack just…he doesn’t get it.

“Need help?” Cloud calls.

Zack starts, then swears as he just stops himself from rubbing his gloved hand across his neck, where the sweat is seeping out from the hood. “No. No, we’re coming out to you,” he says.

Just finish this first, he tells himself. He gets Heidegger’s clothes knotted together enough to keep the insides in place, lets Cissnei document that, and then levers the body out of the plane and down to the waiting tarp. Once that’s in place, he unties the clothes and steps back.

Then he jumps as something moves by his elbow, but it’s just Cloud, holding out a bag so Zack can take off the hood and gloves. Zack was going to take some samples for the pathologist—he’s not one, but SOLDIER gets nagged at often enough by R&D that they all know how to sample—but he has to admit, he’s not really that eager to get on top of that.

“…that doesn’t look right,” Cloud mutters. When Zack looks over, Cloud…well, he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying looking at the corpse, but also he doesn’t look like he’s in any danger of throwing up. He even crouches down for a closer look at it. “It’s like somebody already hung him up to drain out.”

“Hung up?” Cissnei says from the plane doorway.

“He’s from Nibelheim, they do a real mean rabbit stew there and if you want rabbit stew, you have to catch them yourselves,” Zack says immediately.

A flicker of irritation goes over Cissnei’s face. “I get the hunting basics, Zack, and it’s not weird if it’s what you have to do to eat. I just meant does it actually look like somebody hung him up to—”

“Oh…no. I don’t…think so.” Cloud sounds a little uncertain. He tilts his head and starts to reach out, but then snatches back his hand. He puts that behind him and feels around, then twists to find the box of gloves and put a pair on. Then he gingerly picks up Heidegger’s left hand by two fingers and moves it so they can look at the wrist: no ligature marks. “But all the blood is gone. And something clawed him open.”

“You can see the way it twisted, it wouldn’t do that if it was a blade—I mean, okay, maybe a hooked one like a sickle, but…” Zack leans over “…probably wouldn’t scrape bone like that.”

Cissnei works a little not to twist her entire face in disgust, but she’s listening to them. “I went over where he was lying and there’s no blood. The lab can run checks to make sure it just wasn’t scrubbed afterward, but if it was, then it’d look cleaned and it doesn’t. It looks like the rest of the plane.”

“So he was probably dead already, because there’s no blood in his clothes either—this was what he was wearing when Rude saw him get on, right?” Zack says. When Cissnei nods, he looks back down at the corpse and then rubs his hand across the side of his face. “Pilot had to be alive, how he wouldn’t notice…so he was in on it, whatever it was. Was he one of Heidegger’s? I don’t recognize him.”

“He’s Shinra. Not specifically Public Security, and he was cooperating,” Cissnei says. Which starts to make him think the guy was a Turk informant and so that’s all he’s going to get, but then Cissnei pulls out her phone to show him the pilot’s personnel file. “And even if it happened right after take-off, that doesn’t explain where the blood went.”

“…cut open from inside,” Cloud suddenly says.

There’s a stifled exclamation and then shuffling feet. Cissnei’s head snaps up towards the door, and then she makes a jerking motion with her hand to tell Zack to stay while she marches towards the poor airstrip worker who came in and who’s now going to get a rundown in confidentiality protocols. Though since Zack and Cloud saw him too, he’s probably not getting relocated. Zack’s going to check on that, anyway.

“Say that again?” he says, looking back at Cloud. Then he shakes his head and refocuses. “No, I know, but when you say from inside…”

“I don’t know. It’s not like any mutant you’ve shown me before, I just—that’s just what it looks like,” Cloud mutters. He keeps glancing from Zack to the body, clearly agitated, and even though he’s trying to control his breathing, it doesn’t seem to be helping that much. “Just—if it’s a mutant, and it could get on a plane and then look at us—”

“Nothing got outside,” Zack says firmly. He checks on Cissnei and the worker, but they’re still standing in the doorway so he takes Cloud by the arm and pulls the man to the other side of the plane. “Look, we had eyes, nothing showed up, and if it’s a mutant, then it’s going to show up on film and trigger motion sensors and it didn’t.”

“But that thing I saw—it flew,” Cloud insists.

The little guilty wobble in his voice tips Zack off to what’s really eating the man and he moves his hand to Cloud’s shoulder. “Spike. Listen—look at me. You said it was between you and the moon, right? So that’s nowhere near the roof, and maybe that’s something to look into too, but if it never touched down, it can’t be the same thing that we saw in the cockpit.”

“There could be two of them,” Cloud says. He is starting to calm down, but he’s still looking at Zack as if reasoning through it is raising more potential threats than it eliminates. “I know it was at the same time, but—look, what you saw in the plane. If it’s not a mutant…it’s not here anymore, Zack. So what can do that?”

Zack is not saying the fucking word. He’s not. “Something that took all the blood with it too, and I don’t know why it would do that but I know that doesn’t just vanish into thin air. Look, finish checking over the plane. We need to get an update to Angeal so we need to get the facts straight. What we know, what we don’t, and what we’re going to do about it. Got it?”

It takes Cloud a moment, but eventually he gives Zack a tight nod. He takes a step back, looks nervously down at Heidegger and then turns away to…well, yeah, someone needs to check the pilot’s body. They’d mostly ignored him because he didn’t have a giant slash down his middle, but they should check.

And Zack wants to check the plane. Not that he doesn’t trust Cissnei, but he wants to see with his own eyes and feel with his own hands—and okay, deep down, it’s also because he did see that fucking white face staring back at him and he did think that it couldn’t possibly be human even if it looked like one.

But it hasn’t shown up since, and locking everything down and checking the scene over again, bizarre as it is, just keeps telling Zack that this thing is physical in some way. And as long as that’s true, then there’s going to be some way to tackle it. He just needs to find that.

So he leaves Cloud and Cissnei to finish up outside and goes into the plane. Doesn’t glove up again, but he stays in the space between the cockpit and cabin and doesn’t touch anything, just looks around. He can see what Cissnei means about it not looking like anyone had cleaned up the plane—there’s dust coming in already, like everything else in Corel—before putting Heidegger’s body back into it, and while that could maybe be faked, it’d take a lot longer to stage than a few hours.

The cockpit looks the same way, now that he’s looking for it, and even though the pilot wasn’t clawed up, a dead body usually makes some stains. So it’s not that surprising when Cloud calls up to him that the pilot’s been drained of all blood too.

Zack calls back that he heard but looks back into the cabin…and makes himself think about when he saw the figure in the cockpit. It had looked back at him, with its—he sucks his breath and twists around, then squeezes into the cockpit and looks at the pilot seat. That figure had been leaning over the pilot to look at him, and it’d had one hand for balance on the back of the seat. Which is beaten up with the headrest taped together on one side to keep in the stuffing, and when Zack looks, he…doesn’t see any impressions.

He takes a photo, then puts his hand on the chair and lifts it to find clear, lasting dents. Then he calls in Cissnei, who agrees he’s not making this up and documents them for herself. “But if that one we saw was just—like a projection to distract us, how?” she says, half to him and half to her phone. “And that still doesn’t answer how they got out. This plane is too small and I didn’t see—”

“Yeah, I was thinking about that. When you went in here, it was just you, right? Did you go all the way into the cabin?” Zack asks.

“No, but I—” Cissnei starts off defensive and then pulls back, looking hard at him, which is fine because she’s a little confused but does get that he’s just thinking this through and not criticizing her “—I just saw an empty cabin so didn’t need to—didn’t think I needed to when I could see the entire cabin from the door. What I needed to do was get the plane in here and then start checking for alternative exits from it.”

“Right. So you didn’t feel around. I’m just thinking—you didn’t see anything, and then we all saw something, you and me in the front and Cloud was pretty much right overhead, but when we moved…” Zack looks up at the ceiling, then ducks out of the plane. He immediately wheels to the right and drops into a squat in front of the open storage compartment, scanning it. There aren’t any stains or anything to show a body was recently stuffed into it, but if you’re not looking for stains and you’re just looking for anything…Zack hisses. “Cloud, do we have a materia case?”

Cissnei is right behind Zack and she hands one over his shoulder while Cloud is still saying he’ll look. “But that doesn’t look right,” she says, tapping him. “Gloves, Cl—no, see if there’s a—”

“We’re not going to have shielded probes here, c’mon,” Zack says. He does take the case but he doesn’t wait for Cloud to rummage around for something he knows they don’t have. He just pulls out his knife again and uses the tip to scoot the small, dull object from the back corner of the compartment into the case.

It’s definitely made of the same stuff as materia, it has that sheen to it and the faint zing of magic coming into Zack’s hand. But the thing is a lopsided orb, like somebody put it too close to the furnace at the mine, and something else also feels weird about it.

“If I found it in the armory, I’d definitely be calling QC to have words,” Zack says to Angeal about half an hour later.

At this point, going back to town and then turning around to meet the forensic pathologist out here seems like more trouble than it’s worth. So they’d secured the object in a shielded container and finished laying out the bodies, and then Cissnei and Cloud went to try and get some sleep on some sleeping bags the airstrip personnel found and laid down in the corner of the hangar. Zack had volunteered to take first watch partly so he could shoot some updates to Angeal, but he hadn’t been expecting the man to call him back right away.

“You can save that for Procurement when you get back,” Angeal says. The airstrip wifi is, amazingly, good enough for a videocall, though it’s low-res and does nothing for the worry furrows on Angeal’s forehead. “I still can’t fucking believe that Heidegger had a private plane and somewhere to park it that we didn’t know about.”

Well, the Turks knew about it, they were just slow to get there, Zack almost says. He stops less because of Cissnei, who he thinks is actually asleep, than because of the way that Angeal digs his fingers into the side of his nose. “Yeah. Ang, listen, I pretty much put all the known facts for now into the email and it’s not much. I don’t want to keep you if you’ve got to—”

“It’s fine, Zack. I wanted to get up to speed and anyway, not doing much now expect waiting around for the car to the airport,” Angeal mutters. He pulls at his nose, then blinks blearily at the camera. Then he looks a little embarrassed. “Still in Midgar. Gen already flew back to Wutai but I wanted to get some stuff set first and—always takes so much fucking longer than it should.”

“Gotcha. But I still don’t really have that much—I wish I did, believe me,” Zack says. “Just a bunch of leads but nothing I can call solid.”

Angeal sighs and nods, his hand going from his nose back to run through the hair on top of his head. Then he drops that hand to pull at his shoulder. “This ghost in the cockpit, did you recognize it?”

“I…” Zack starts and then he doesn’t know how to finish.

“I forgot to ask—sorry, my mind is a zillion places right now—but did anyone actually get you a photo of Sephiroth?” Angeal asks. “Because that’s important, and I didn’t just send you there to screw up so if you don’t have one, fuck R&D and my f—”

“Cloud got the standard profile photos with the intake record,” Zack says, seeing how Angeal is getting worked up. “I see what you mean—different but still looks like somebody you’re gonna see in the weightroom.”

Angeal’s expression blanks for a moment. Then he comes back to life, rolling his eyes at Zack. “I never know what to do with you, puppy. But okay. So you know what he looked like.”

“Yeah. Yeah, and…and honestly, I wasn’t taking notes before Cissnei shot out the windshield. We, uh, haven’t had a chance to talk that part over either,” Zack admits. “So if you’re asking if we’re seeing the same ghost people are trying to call up, I can’t—”

“Why the hell would they call him up, of all people?” Angeal asks. It takes a moment for Zack to see that Angeal isn’t asking him, and that the man is now looking somewhere off-camera. Angeal grimaces and ducks his head as if he didn’t mean to say that to whoever it is, then puts his hand over the camera and says something Zack can’t make out. Then his hand comes off and he peers at Zack, worry coming through despite how bloodshot his eyes are. “Zack, I don’t know how reachable I’ll be after this—I’ll be on a plane in the morning—but just because Heidegger looks dead doesn’t mean you should stop digging. Something has been going on in Corel for a while now, and we’ve just never gotten to look into it right because of the mines. They were worried with how the miners are already touchy—”

“That part actually hasn’t been too bad. I mean, it’s not exactly a ticker-tape parade and free ice cream, but so far everyone we’ve met has been pretty decent. If they’re slamming us, they’re not doing it to our faces,” Zack says. “And I’ve gotten one good food rec already.”

Which doesn’t reassure Angeal at all, judging from the way he blinks a couple times and then sighs. “You’re such a puppy sometimes. But then, they’re probably reading that and maybe that’s a good thing,” Angeal snorts. “Look, all I’m saying is, stay on this. I think you’re doing good so far, and all this stuff you’re finding, send it in even if you’re not sure about it.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Zack says. He snaps off a salute, which does seem to cheer up Angeal, and then looks up as one of Cissnei or Cloud makes the sleeping bags rustle. But when he looks over, they’re both still asleep, so he turns back to Angeal. “I’m here till you tell me to stop, Ang. I just wish I could get you actual answers instead of just—all these weird stories that don’t make sense.”

Angeal doesn’t say anything for a couple seconds. But he scrunches his face the way he does when he’s mulling over some part of his and Genesis’ past that he wishes wasn’t intruding into the present. He usually wants to take care of that kind of thing himself and he’ll just tell Zack so Zack knows it’s taken care of, but this time he seems even more reluctant than usual. Which is why, to be honest, Zack can’t stay annoyed at him for too long, because he always takes so much on himself.

“I think they’re related,” he finally says, very lowly. His eyes flick to the side, checking on whoever else is there with him, and then settle on Zack with…regret? Though it’s hard for Zack to see why Angeal needs to regret letting him know, since he’s literally the one who sent the updates in. “Heidegger and Sephiroth and the Dr. Valentine story you heard about…Heidegger tried to kill the whole SOLDIER project when Sephiroth disappeared. He came back talking about how the man had gone crazy first, but Hojo was challenging him on it, saying he hadn’t brought enough evidence and was hiding what really happened. Nobody liked Hojo but everyone knows Heidegger would lie to get a free lunch, so they stalemated.”

“Oh, that makes…” Zack pauses. Then he almost doesn’t say anything, what with how rough Angeal is looking, but finally he decides to just do it as noncommittally as he can. “So people knew the record was wrong and Sephiroth didn’t go on his own?”

Angeal blinks hard, and Zack knows him well enough to tell the man honestly hadn’t realized Zack was up to speed there, which tells him that Angeal wasn’t deliberately trying to keep it from him. And there is a war on, it’s not like Angeal doesn’t have other things on his mind. “Yeah, but not a lot. Hollander only ever mentioned it once and when Gen brought it up again, he pretended like it didn’t happen, and you know how much he likes talking about how he saved SOLDIER,” he says. “I honestly wasn’t sure if it was true either, but Tseng dropped it too.”

“Right, I heard it from Cissnei,” Zack says.

Which makes Angeal blink in surprise again, but he doesn’t follow up on that. “The only other thing is Hollander mentioned Valentine when he brought it up. It wasn’t much, just that local R&D hadn’t noticed anything that bizarre about Sephiroth before he went AWOL and Hojo had cited Dr. Valentine as a witness. And I guess Valentine was enough of a neutral that people didn’t immediately say Hojo was just trying to cover his own ass.”

“Huh, well, Valentine supposedly dropped out right around the same time. Did it sound like Hojo talked to Valentine a lot later, or right after they noticed Sephiroth was missing?” Zack asks.

But Angeal is shaking his head. “That’s it, that’s all I remember, and—listen, when you hit a wall, tell me. I’m not afraid to go to Hollander over this. But I just…I don’t want to do it more than once, Zack.”

“Yes, sir, and don’t blame you at all,” Zack says. “I do think there’s still more to go here, and you need to concentrate on Wutai.”

“Don’t remind me,” Angeal winces, but then he lets out a dragging groan. “Actually, wait, I did need you to remind—one thing before I let you go, Zack, not about this. Hendrickson has your notes but that bullshit with Highwind last month, what did we end up telling Procurement again?”

Zack starts to say, but then Angeal puts up his hand. He’s looking off-screen again and while he doesn’t want the interruption, he doesn’t look angry about it so it must be someone he likes.

“Sorry, hold that thought,” Angeal says. He ducks back to look at Zack and then gets up from his seat. “Yeah, it’s Zack, you can say hi if you want while I just—Zack, be right back. Sorry.”

Angeal’s the boss, reprioritizing on the fly is his prerogative and anyway it becomes totally fine when Aerith’s face slides in from the side of the screen. She looks just as exhausted as Angeal, but brightens up as she sees Zack, which makes him really, really hope he can hide how he kind of went supernova about that.

“Hi,” she says. “So sorry about that, Momma’s asking for Angeal. It’s not one of her attacks, I think she just wants to nail down something before the car gets here for us.”

“Nah, it’s fine, you know me and I am the king of last-minute packing,” Zack says. When Aerith’s smile goes a little stiff, he winces. “Sorry. I just figured…you said a car and none of us are in town, so…”

This has only happened a couple times since Zack got his first bloody nose from Angeal in the training room and thus earned eternal privileges doing the man’s laundry, but when he and Angeal and Genesis are all unavailable to check on Aerith and Ifalna, Angeal sends them to a safehouse. Zack isn’t sure where it is, as it’s probably the only place he hasn’t had to go get Angeal from at some point, except that it’s somewhere that Ifalna always seems desperately relieved to get away from, and that even Aerith demurs instead of finding something nice to say about it. But they’d rather go to it than risk staying in Shinra without one of them, even if it’s in Angeal’s private quarters.

“No, you’re right. We’re going in a couple hours—Momma and Angeal both think it’s better, even if she’s still having these nightmares,” Aerith says. She softens her smile to show she doesn’t hold it against Zack, but that just makes her look even more depressed about having to go to that place. “But Angeal says he’ll get you back from Corel as soon as he can, so hopefully it won’t be that long.”

“Right,” Zack says. And he is not a work-shirker and he does mean all of his promises to Angeal, including the one he just made about keeping on with the digging here. But man, does he want to just take that one back right now and say this Sephiroth mystery is just an unsolvable mess so he might as well go back. “Or Ang might beat me. I mean, him and Gen? Those Wutaians are going to regret it pretty soon.”

“Well, they’re fighting for their homes. I can understand,” Aerith says, mild and yet more uncompromisingly bucking the Shinra party line than the full-blown riots under the Plate a couple weeks ago. “Anyway, don’t worry about us.”

“Yeah, I know, you always say that. But…uh, your mom, I’m sorry she’s still having those,” Zack says. “Can she…is it something that medication’s going to help with, at least?”

Aerith winces. Then raises one hand and flutters it at Zack before rubbing at her temple. “No, it’s just…I wish…” her voice drops “…Momma keeps thinking Angeal’s gone already, so it’ll probably be better when he actually is. She just…she just keeps dreaming of him gone, him and Genesis and everyone…and just this dark hole in the ground—but sorry, you don’t want to hear that.”

“Hey, if it makes you or her or anyone feel better, it’d be worth it,” Zack reassures her.

She looks up at him and for a second he thinks she might say more…but then she shakes her head. Smiling at him, but that’s a definite no. “Angeal says you’re in the middle of something pretty important too,” she says. “I really don’t want to be a distraction, and Momma wouldn’t want that either. What you do matters too, Zack.”

Which is the kind of thing that’s on a zillion motivational posters and yet when it comes out of Aerith’s mouth, straightforward and sweet and simple, he can’t laugh. He can’t even say anything back for a second there, as she just keeps on smiling at him and making him feel like he has to make it better for her.

“Listen. I know you can’t say where, but I just want—if you need anything, I might be checking my messages more than Ang even though I’m working. It isn’t a warzone over here, you know,” Zack says as he pulls out his phone and then thumbs Aerith up in his messaging app. “I’m going to invite you to my private field channel. Just use it if you need it, okay?”

Her eyes widen a little—she knows exactly what he means and also knows that as civilians, even with her mother being Angeal’s partner of record, they’re not supposed to have access to those. But Zack already knows Ifalna contacts Angeal that way, and from the way Aerith doesn’t ask questions about how this works, he’s right that Aerith knew that too.

“Thank you.” Aerith hesitates and her head tips up, eyes going further up and sideways. Then she starts to move out from behind the laptop, only to duck back and give Zack a small but brilliant smile. “I won’t use it unless it’s really bad. Thanks, Zack.”

“Yeah—” Zack says, and then hastily rearranges his expression as Angeal sits back down in front of the screen. “Okay, so Highwind and Procurement, it’s not a big deal, there’s no cover story, just tell Hendriksen that Procurement has everything and they’re just stalling because they don’t want to be the sign-off even though it is literally their job.”

“Got it,” Angeal says. He taps at the keys, looking at a different window, and then back at Zack. “Okay, thanks, Zack. Look—”

Zack jerks his thumb away from ‘end call.’ “Yep?”

Angeal pauses, then drops his eyes. “Just keep me posted with everything. Don’t leave anything out, even if it sounds stupid or unrelated.”

“One-ten, sir,” Zack says, and then they end the call.

When the window closes, he checks the time on his phone and sees he’s got another hour till he’s supposed to wake up Cissnei. He looks around the hangar. When his gaze crosses the two bodies laid out on the tarps, he grimaces, but they’re…dead bodies, and he’s seen that before. It’s not like when they first walked in.

Not like when it felt like there was someone else, Zack finally admits to himself. As he does, his eyes drift up to the cockpit. The shattered windshield means he can’t really see the interior anymore, but he can paint over that with his memory and try to think now, when it’s calm and his skin isn’t crawling…

Did it look like Sephiroth? Or did it look like someone else? Tall, he thinks now, tall with how far they’d bent over the pilot, tall and wearing a SOLDIER uniform but they were so white all over except for the coat—Sephiroth had had that silver-white hair, but that was when he was alive. If that was a ghost, weren’t they all pale? So was it actually the same face as the photo, or was it someone else?

He thinks and thinks, but in the end, he can’t say for sure.

Chapter 14: Past

“I don’t want you to die here,” Valentine says over the generous spread he’s set out. Not only food but bottles of vitamins, blister packs of supplement tablets, and several types of IV bags. “If you’ve managed to push Jenova out once, then you deserve the chance to understand how and why, and how to replicate it.”

Sephiroth exhales on a choked laugh. The man is sincere, even he has to admit that, but it’s still a test of his credulity—not to mention his sanity, a small but growing voice is whispering—to believe that Valentine is blind to the circumstances. “Of course. As a scientist, this must be fascinating to you.”

Valentine flinches but keeps his gaze on Sephiroth. After he’d laid out everything and pushed it within Sephiroth’s reach, he had moved back almost up to the door. His gun is out and resting beside him on the floor, but he’d have to move and then turn to open the door, which is such poor positioning that Sephiroth takes it as intentional.

“I do want to understand too. Which is selfish and cold, and you’re right to point it out,” Valentine says after a moment. He stops there, and since he has a bag with him that he has yet to open, Sephiroth assumes he’ll turn to that and provide yet more documentation by way of compensation. But then Valentine glances over to Vincent’s corner. “I’ve—we tried to find a way to pull Jenova’s influence out of someone—out of your mother. I didn’t want her to die either—I didn’t want her to have to be killed.”

Sephiroth inhales sharply before he can stop himself. He stiffens as Valentine looks back at him, but the man clearly isn’t seeing anything in the present time, as he gazes mournfully at the space between them.

“She fought, you would’ve read that. And in the end, she granted permission to do what needed to be done,” Valentine goes on.

As much as Sephiroth hates doing so, he had read that, both parts, and he has to incline his head. “She wanted to preserve herself more than she wanted to live at all costs. Which I can understand,” he says.

Valentine’s eyes focus a little at the bite in Sephiroth’s words, but he still doesn’t seem to be addressing Sephiroth so much as some invisible judgment hanging over him. “With my son as well—we figured out that Hojo had exposed him to Jenova, and it was only because he’d already been merged with Chaos that she wasn’t able to gain a permanent foothold. But she’s…very stubborn, and she fought till I almost thought I’d lose him as well. He did lose much of his left arm.”

Against his own better judgment, a spark of curiosity hijacks Sephiroth. He blames it on his growing inability to suppress his hunger. “I was wondering if that was an organic development or a…attributed to Chaos.”

“A little of both. I tinker with engineering from time to time, and in the mines prosthetics are sadly necessary. So I took a prototype we were trialing here, but once it was fitted on, Chaos made their own adjustments.” Valentine glances at Vincent’s corner again and Sephiroth doesn’t miss the dull but unmistakable flicker of hope in the man’s eyes. Of course it soon fades as Vincent continues to be unresponsive, but given the length of time the two must have been struggling with each other, their current relations must be an improvement. Which does make Sephiroth wonder about what it’d initially been like when his mother and Vincent had returned from Nibelheim. “I thought Vincent was only able to do that because of Chaos. If that’s not the case and it’s possible to overcome Jenova without any other externality, then—then I was wrong before. I did kill people who didn’t need to be killed, and I don’t want to repeat that error ever again. I don’t begrudge you hating me, but I do want to persuade you to stay alive to do it.”

There’s something similar in both of them, father and son. The way that they both seem passively devoted to letting opposition rake them over and over, in the manner of a dumb rock, and yet raise their head at the end of it to show a sudden flare of life. And to be fair to Valentine, Sephiroth wouldn’t consider merely spiting another to be sufficient reason to give up on everything.

He can see, a little, why his mother didn’t want to lose the man. Then Sephiroth grimaces, but the thought persists like a pebble he can’t quite dislodge from his boot as he slowly pushes up to the bars, and he ends up having to press down to learn its full shape before he can rid himself of it.

No, he still doesn’t like Valentine, and he certainly isn’t going to forgive the man for what he’s done to Sephiroth. But Sephiroth can understand, the same way he can recognize the habits and motivations of an opponent without gaining any desire to surrender, and more importantly, he can stop wondering if his mother had made a mistake. She’d done exactly what she’d thought she should, for the goals she thought were most critical, and if that had led to her being trapped at Hojo’s hands—she’d still never expressed regret for going to Nibelheim, only for certain decisions she’d made once there. Tactical errors Sephiroth can also understand, but overall he still thinks his mother had her reasons. He still thinks she is the reason why he's survived so far, and not aliens or scientists or any other claimant, and he needs to respect that legacy.

“My caloric needs are higher than normal. I also metabolize the water-soluble vitamins faster than the baseline average man,” Sephiroth says. He pauses as Valentine, eyes lighting up rather like when the man had looked for Vincent just now, takes out a small notebook and a pen. “I need the same ones as anyone else, but I don’t need anything exotic on top of that. I’ve checked that thoroughly.”

“I’d heard the SOLDIER program was intended for eventual mass-enrollment, and that makes more sense than engineering a dependency. But I’ve also read a few of Hojo’s papers,” Valentine says as he writes down the names and amounts of each vitamin as Sephiroth reels them off. When he’s finished, he looks over what he’s brought, then purses his lips. “You’ll need more. This will at least maintain you for the next stretch but it won’t correct your deficiencies.”

“You can bring more, but there’s something else going on,” Sephiroth decides to add, thinking that Valentine might be vulnerable enough now to revisit earlier ground. Or at least that Valentine’s calculus may have changed; the man is very much regulating the amount, type, and timing of information he provides to Sephiroth, and hopefully this spell of cooperation will have hit some benchmarks of his. “I’m familiar with how nutritional deficiencies will affect me—Hojo was very thorough about that—and they can’t explain everything. It can’t just be Jenova either, it’s not as if I haven’t been stress-tested, so what happened to me in the tunnel—”

“Her influence wasn’t fully activated before. And you’re not suppressing her on your own right now,” Valentine says.

Sephiroth makes an irritated noise to cover up his elation at the man’s slip. “What else is in my food, then? Perhaps you should have asked about my dietary needs earlier—it’s not as if I’m immune to everything.”

He actually doesn’t think Valentine has been adulterating the meals. Exhausted and weakened though he is, his senses are only dulled or slow, not deactivated, and he should still be able to pick up on many of the commonly-available drugs one would use with a prisoner. And he is immune to far more than is in the public record, but Valentine hasn’t shown any signs of surprise that he isn’t succumbing to a sedative or anything like that.

Though the man startles now. Then Valentine resettles himself, guilt freshly painted across his face. “No. No, I haven’t—this is all safe to eat,” he says, indicating the items between them. “The only drugs I’ve given to you are Cure Potions—also some antibiotic spray when I was cleaning your wounds. That’s not what I meant.”

Tempting though it is, Sephiroth doesn’t immediately pounce on that last part. Instead he snorts and lets his skepticism flower, and at the same time, he edges up to the bars with one hand to his stomach, which helpfully growls on cue. He does need to eat, but he thinks he can stretch this out for a few more minutes.

Valentine winces. Then looks down at the unopened bag. His hand goes to it, then withdraws as he takes a long breath and holds it for a couple seconds before releasing it. “Chaos—their presence has some…contradictory effects. They repel Jenova as much as the two…incite one another.”

Sephiroth opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a croak. He’s been ignoring his thirst since he spilled his water, but suddenly he can’t anymore and he grudgingly puts his hand through the bars for a fresh bottle. “So he’s supposed to nurse as well as guard me?” he rasps.

“I wouldn’t—” Valentine starts, and then stops himself to cast yet another despairing look over at Vincent’s corner. “No. I wouldn’t say that. Vincent…he’s here because of me, not because he chose this.”

Because Sephiroth is in the middle of a swallow, he can’t look at either directly, but he suspects he sees more that way. Valentine doesn’t move suddenly or betray any signal that he sees Vincent react, but Sephiroth hears an extra heartbeat over the slosh of the water down his throat.

He lowers the bottle. The heartbeat doesn’t repeat that initial rough thump, but does remain in the background. “I suppose this is where you hand me another stack of papers.”

Valentine exhales tiredly. “I thought…” he twists a little, first towards the bag and then towards Sephiroth “…never easier, fool that I am. Vincent can’t leave these tunnels, not without risking a transformation we—he can’t control, and I brought you to them for essentially the same reason.”

Then this isn’t where he’d first lured Sephiroth. “There’s some kind of dampening effect?” Sephiroth says, glancing around.

“It’s contradictory,” Valentine says, and now he stoops and pulls out the expected sheaf of papers. “Geological reports. The reason why I was looking for Chaos here in the first place, and why Lucrecia came back with Vincent—she didn’t come back only for me, I’ve never fooled myself about that. She was trying to make amends but she was also trying to finish her work.”

With that, Valentine slides the papers across the floor to Sephiroth. As soon as they’re in motion, he pivots; he doesn’t wait to see that they’ve not scattered out of their folders before reaching Sephiroth, but walks through the door.

Sephiroth bites back his exclamation and makes himself put the water bottle down with the lid securely on. He starts to reach for the nearest of the files, but his hands are shaking—he curses as one folder spins off a few inches. It’s not completely out of reach but he’s forced to acknowledge he needs to address his hunger first, and reach for a meal packet instead.

But he’s barely opened it when Valentine comes back into the room. The other man is hauling a long hose behind him, and while it’s not clear exactly how far away the source is, he has to put the end down and go back into the hall to tug in enough slack for it to reach the cage. “I don’t want you to feel like an animal or an experiment,” he starts, and then grimaces. “I know what I’m doing, I’m not blind, but I don’t…if there’s no need to be cruel, then I won’t be. The drain over there is working, and there’s enough water for you to rinse off if you keep it to under ten minutes.”

In all honesty, bathing has been one of the lesser concerns. But offering an amenity in the midst of deprivation can have a strange way of focusing attention and Sephiroth experiences that now, suddenly and disgustingly aware of the filth itching his scalp, the black under his nails, the sticky, oily feeling all over his skin. He wants the shower—he wants that and food and water and fresh air and no one to ever tell him what to do again, all of that, all at once and so much that it pins him down for a second.

Valentine apparently takes his silence for reluctant assent, because the man carries the looped hose to where it’s within Sephiroth’s reach. Then he backs off, pausing twice to pick up the spilled folders and move them to one side of the hose, the side where if Sephiroth stands in the corner of the cell and washes, he won’t catch them in the spray.

“I need to go now,” Valentine says as he backs up towards the door again. He pauses with his hand on the handle. “I’ll be back again in four hours, but then I may have to—I’ll bring enough so that neither you nor Vincent should have an issue if I’m late after that.”

“Of course, if there is an issue with us and you’re detained, no one else is ever going to know about it,” Sephiroth remarks. He’s managed to fight down his bout of—of pseudo-hysteria—and starts eating to have that out of the way and not have it making his thoughts deranged. “Heidegger is finally out of his cups enough to think it’s a bad look to come back without me, I take it.”

“You won’t starve. I wouldn’t allow—” Valentine almost looks at Vincent’s corner but stops himself “—if Heidegger lashes out at anyone for his troubles, it won’t be on your head.”

Sephiroth can think of many ways to avoid that besides being imprisoned in an underground tunnel with an uncommunicative Chaos-altered companion, but he doesn’t say that. “You should tell him that I was concerned Hojo would find out about it—being ill,” he says instead. “He knows the last thing I want is to be put back into his care.”

“But that would make him go looking for you,” Valentine says. Not accusingly, as if he thinks he’s caught Sephiroth out trying to trick him, but only in confusion.

“No, it won’t. It’s not been that long and he knows even ill, he can’t take me against my will without more people than he can order around here. He’ll sit tight and wait till you tell him I’m too ill to move, and then he’ll try something,” Sephiroth explains.

This is patently not to Valentine’s liking at all, but it does make sense to him. He nods slowly, his eyes both sympathetic and guilt-stricken. “Thank you,” he says. “I’ll be outside but down the…far enough I won’t hear you. I’ll just come back in fifteen minutes for the hose, and then I have to go for good.”

Then turns. Hesitates, and for long enough that Sephiroth thinks perhaps the man is still second-guessing him…but no, Valentine leaves.

Sephiroth exhales slowly. He’s tired and hungry and thirsty, but like he told Valentine, there’s something else—his thoughts seem to take incrementally longer to come together, and then suddenly they’ll rush in torrents that make him feel as if he’s a child again, too intelligent to not know what’s happening to him but too immature to manage himself enough to see past his own pains to others’ weaknesses. Of course there’s the threat that these are unnatural changes in his mind, but he can’t spend his entire time cringing from Jenova, damn it.

And he's not going to overcome any of this by making himself weaker. So he eats the food, forcing himself not to bolt it, and then he drinks the water. Valentine did bring enough of both that he has leftovers once he starts to feel satiated, and he sets those aside; he still hasn’t had enough calories but it’ll be easier to manage the effects of that if he strings out his intake. So then his eyes turn to the papers.

His hand moves that way too, then comes back to his side. He wants to know, badly, but the interruptions—infuriating as they are, they keep reminding him he’s human too. And human as he is, he wants to clean off.

So he pushes to the other side of the cell and twists to put his hand out for the hose, and Vincent is squatting there with the end laying across one knee. “You’re fishing for something with Father,” Vincent says over Sephiroth’s suppressed grunt of surprise. “You’re not scared of going back to Hojo more than you are of leaving before you find out what you want.”

“And is that a crime? When I’ve been trapped here and your father is clearly trying to address his past mistakes through me, like this?” Sephiroth snaps.

They look at each other in silence. Vincent is staring straight at Sephiroth, carrying himself…not like a dazed or wary animal for once, but like an actual person. For the first time Sephiroth thinks he could easily envision the man in a Turk suit.

Then Vincent snorts. He takes the hose off his knee and pushes it through the bars, then moves back into his squat. “It’s not the entire tunnel that keeps me here. He wasn’t lying, he’s giving you the reports and you’ll read—”

“But if you can shorten that for me, it’d greatly help my feelings towards your father,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent snorts again. “Liar.”

Fury blossoms in Sephiroth, because how dare the man, how dare he even if his damned mind is probably riddled with Chaos—and then the anger sweeps away as Sephiroth reassesses the other man.

Who gestures at the hose again, expressionless, and then looks at the door. “He’ll be back in a few more minutes.”

“And now you’re concerned for my dignity. Keep it up and I might start to suspect you’ve merely been pretending to be losing your humanity,” Sephiroth mutters, still studying Vincent rather than the door.

Then he picks up the hose. There’s a knob on the side that, when turned, lets out a trickle of water. Icy, of course, it’s not as if Valentine could’ve been expected to bring a heater with him; Sephiroth barely can believe that the water flowing out isn’t contaminated, or at least not to the degree that his eyes or fingers or nose can sense.

Vincent is still sitting there. He doesn’t blink as Sephiroth snakes out of his sweatpants and then starts cupping water over his legs and groin. He’s certainly looking on, and not with the incomprehension of a child or an idiot, but something besides mere physical interest is clearly motivating him and it’s that that strikes Sephiroth, the idea Vincent might actually be…planning. “It’s easier to be as human as I can stand, when I think about…” and now Vincent looks away, but only briefly “…he’s going to come back. He’s been telling you what he knows, in the order he knows that it makes sense to him, but—”

“And now we’re moving from defending him to offering conspiracies against him?” Sephiroth mutters. He is listening, and using the way that he needs to twist himself about to get water onto his buttocks and back without splashing it over the papers to take covert looks at Vincent’s face. “Or are you just going to turn around and tell him?”

“—I’m telling you so you can do what you want with it. Talk to him if you want or don’t,” Vincent says. His tone has sharpened, but his expression doesn’t change. “He thinks that what he’s done, he’s done to keep things from getting worse. He can’t undo what Hojo did, what Jenova’s done, what Chaos does to me. But he can keep it from progressing. That’s what he has done.”

Sephiroth keeps the hose at lap-level and uses his hand to scoop the water up across his chest and shoulders. This is partly to minimize how far the water pools away from him, but also so that he can hear Vincent better because the man’s voice is steadily dropping in volume. “And is that what you want?”

Vincent’s eyes widen. Not dramatically, but enough to be noticed. He’s silent for a second. “I remember being someone else. I used to sleep most of the time, so I wouldn’t have this—” he indicates around them “—constantly showing me the difference.”

That makes Sephiroth snort. Then he pushes up to the bars, dragging the hose up one and then using the bar to help brace it so that he can get the water flowing over the top of his head. He can’t see Vincent’s face that way but Vincent doesn’t move at all and the man’s hands are on his knees only an inch to the other side of the bars. Vincent’s breathing and heartbeat don’t change either, though it is a signal of some kind that Sephiroth has been able to detect both through this entire conversation. What kind of signal, he’s still assessing.

“If you asked Father to let you out, he would,” Vincent says. He waits for Sephiroth to work through the incredulous, explosive exclamation before he goes on. “He’d tell you first that the moment you start to lose yourself, and he thinks you might be out of control and about to hurt yourself or someone else, he’ll stop you. Then he’d let you out, and let you see how far you can go before you start changing. He doesn’t want to because of how slow you’re already healing, but if you push him to prove it, he would.”

“Firsthand experience?” Sephiroth asks after a long struggle with his temper. Something about Vincent’s manner now is even more…unsettling is the right word, even though the man is acting far more human than at any point up to now. Perhaps because he is acting so, and so Sephiroth can’t simply dismiss it as Chaos or Chaos-related trauma—as being inhuman.

But at the same time his instincts are telling him this is an opening. This is Vincent changing his behavior because at some point he’s changed his mind, and even if Sephiroth is not clear why, he can’t miss his chance. So when Vincent laughs lowly, Sephiroth swallows his first instinct to snarl and instead raises his head to look at the other man.

“Yes,” Vincent says. Then he pauses and his eyes move up and down Sephiroth and then that shift happens again, when Sephiroth knows he’s looking at more than Vincent looking back at him, but this time it doesn’t seem so…it’s more than only Vincent but nevertheless Sephiroth has the impression of a unified personality in that head. “He tried that with me but also with Lucrecia…she told me she’d rather die than try that again.”

“Because she didn’t want to give herself over to Hojo’s alien infatuation,” Sephiroth says. He rakes one hand through his hair, then pulls it out to rinse the collected grime from under his nails. “And this isn’t an appealing alternative, though you probably disagree with me. You and Jenova.”

Vincent’s mouth twitches, but whether towards a smile or a scowl is impossible to tell. “Yes. But if you’ve changed—does it make you hear her less or more?”

“What—I didn’t hear her before,” Sephiroth snaps. “Hojo did virtually everything you can think of to torment me but even he didn’t invade my mind, and it’s only when I came here that that—”

“Being here didn’t make you hear her, it just made you listen when you weren’t before,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth bites down on his reply. He has to, or else he’ll kill this avenue entirely and if it does turn out to be a false chance, he’s determined that the fault for that will lie with Vincent and not himself. He sluices his head with the water again, letting himself exhale at its cold, and then thinks he’s calmed down. “That’s not what your father said.”

“Because that’s how he understands it. And that’s how I’ve told him, but it’s…” Vincent finally seems to struggle with himself, his lips working and peeling back from his teeth—his canines are unnaturally long at rest, Sephiroth notes—before he roughly shakes himself “…I think Lucrecia tried too. Tried to tell…before she…went…”

“Exactly how did she die?” Sephiroth suddenly thinks to ask. Recalling Vincent’s earlier comment too, about Chaos living but not necessarily understanding what they lived through. “You said you’d killed her. But how—was she still—at the end, was she still—”

Vincent’s head snaps back up. “Not now,” he says, holding Sephiroth’s gaze. “Just read, and think—does she sound different, now that you’re here? Because you’re changed. You’re not the same as you were when I bit you before.”

Because Valentine had implied this isn’t the same place that he’d guided Sephiroth to, Sephiroth suddenly remembers. He stiffens and Vincent relaxes: the other man doesn’t seem to revel in Sephiroth’s reaction but does seem to take it as a signal he’s achieved his goal with this conversation.

Then Vincent jerks around. His eyes widen again, sharply, as he faces the door and for the first time with this interaction, Sephiroth feels the sensation of something circling the edges of his mind. He thinks it’s Jenova prodding at him—he hisses and throws the hose back through the bars, then grabs at his head with both hands as he concentrates as hard as he can on the idea that he is himself, that he is here and she is there.

Thankfully it’s only a fleeting brush and doesn’t bring any pain with it—perhaps she is weakening, or at least he’s losing his appeal for her—though Sephiroth digs his nails into his scalp for several more seconds after that, in case she’s feinting and means to come at him a second time. But then he hears the footsteps in the hall, and before he thinks he pulls his head up.

She’s not in his mind, and Vincent is back in his corner, while Valentine is pushing open the door. Sephiroth exhales, and then straightens himself. He shrugs off Valentine’s stammered apology at finding him still naked, saying he’s finished with the hose and turning around to pick up the sweatpants. Valentine gave him an extra blanket as well, but he pushes that aside and goes to get his old one to use as a towel.

While he’s occupied with that, Valentine goes over to Vincent’s corner. The man stands for a few minutes, sighing, before laying down the usual offering of a packet of blood, and then leaves with a promise to return as soon as Heidegger can be put off. Using Sephiroth’s suggestions, of course.

It’s a good sign in terms of making inroads with the man, but Sephiroth still has a cynical twist to his mouth as he settles down with the new batch of papers. He pulls over his mother’s notes too, grimacing as he notices how the edges are already developing smudges and creases, and starts to read. Two paragraphs in, he looks up and listens, but there’s nothing either in the hall or from Vincent’s side.

And then he listens for her, too. Thinking fiercely that this is no invitation, that the only way she’ll ever make it into his mind is as mangled as he can manage, but he does try to listen for her. He can’t contain her simply by cringing away, he’ll have to develop tactics for finding her as well as for beating her back, or else he risks ceding the initiative to her and that is always the tactic of the losing army. It’s not only because of what Vincent said.

Anyway, there’s nothing. Jenova does seem to take breaks, it seems; she’s not constantly crouching at the thresholds of his mind. But Sephiroth does think about it after that, about whether he’s the same man who first walked into the cave with Valentine. He is himself, he has no doubts there, but he runs a finger across the scars on his arm and looks at Vincent’s corner again, and he thinks about it.

Then, because there’s no other way to find out, he reads.

Chapter 15: Present

Cissnei takes the shift after Zack, and then the forensic pathologist actually shows up early so Cloud never has to take a turn. He feels guilty about that for some reason, so volunteers to go try and find them breakfast and better coffee than the filtered gasoline that the airstrip workers have while Zack and Cissnei oversee the body transfer.

The pathologist blanches when he realizes it’s Heidegger, but seems relieved to be told he has to hand his report to Zack and Cissnei and no one else. “I always hand-write it first anyway, then put it into the system. Kind of old-fashioned but I guess it works out here,” he says.

“Yeah, actually less steps for you,” Zack agrees. “So when do you think you’ll have preliminary results for us?”

“On the bodies? I’ll do them while you’re at breakfast, so long as you understand I can’t tell you anything that needs to go into a test tube first,” the pathologist says. But he’s less confident when he turns to look at the plane. “But that—look, if I can’t have any of the locals on it, then I’m the whole team and all my equipment is already taken up with your other samples.”

“Don’t worry about the rest. Any samples outside of the body need to get shipped out and we’ll take care of that,” Cissnei says, which starts to make the man look relieved. “Just make sure you package them properly—you can’t just segregate, you’re going to have to do it at Level 4.”

The pathologist’s eyes bulge. For a second he looks like he’s going to explode if he doesn’t get at least one question out, but he just exhales. Blinks a few times, nods slowly, and goes off to do his business. He still doesn’t look comfortable by any means, but by now Zack can tell when someone has found what they need to just leave it at work, and he sees that in the man’s face.

“We’re going to have to find a reason to keep all these people here. That guy’s from Midgar, I know he knows to keep his mouth shut but everybody else…” Cissnei mutters. “This can’t leak, not right now.”

“I don’t think they want to tell anybody any more than we—than Midgar wants people to know we’re operating without a Head of Public Security. We already reminded them of all the rules and penalties, so what else do you want to scare them with?” Zack says. It comes out a little harsher than he meant it to and he grimaces. “Look—”

“I’m not saying we should just herd them into a building and shoot them,” Cissnei says, and then raises a brow. “What, that wasn’t what you were about to say?”

They really, really need that coffee. “Actually, no, it wasn’t. Just…look, the bodies are off our hands, I honestly don’t think anyone’s going to run off and post this online in the next five minutes, can we just sit down for a sec and think this through?”

“If you can find a chair,” Cissnei quips with a long look around the chair-less hangar. But she’s already turning her body towards the door, so she’s not really arguing.

When they step out of the hangar, dawn is lightening one side of the sky but it’s still pretty damn dark outside with all of the airstrip’s lights off except for a lonely strip of safety lighting leading back to the radar bunker. It’s cold too, but that isn’t why Zack shivers as soon as he’s through the door.

Cissnei pulls her suitjacket more tightly around herself even though there’s very little wind, then turns around to look at the now closed-door. “Do you…” she starts.

But she leaves it there, and a moment later she suggests they go not to the bunker but back to their parked rental car. Zack agrees, but then winces a couple minutes later when they arrive at the spot which does not have the car, because Cloud took it to go get them breakfast.

“It’s fine. There are seats anyway,” Cissnei says, taking one on the concrete stanchion marking out the end of the tiny lot. She looks up at Zack, who shrugs and braces himself against the next one. “HQ’s not going to let the news out. No glossing it over, they’re just not even going to say it. Not with Hewley and Rhapsodos both in Wutai.”

“Well, were you planning on a press conference?” Zack says. Again, it comes out like he thinks she’s attacking him and she honestly isn’t playing it that way. Sure, this isn’t what he wants to talk about, but they do need to and she’s just saying what he’s already thinking, and he—he sighs. “Fuck. Sorry, I—”

Surprisingly, Cissnei doesn’t even look mad at him after that first irritated blink. “Yeah, this is all kinds of creepy, and I—honestly thought I’d seen about as bad it can get. As far as we could tell, Hollander’s never even done a layover out here.”

Zack blinks himself, since he’s not sure why she’s saying that. She misses it because she’s fidgeting with her suitjacket again, and by the time she looks back at him, he’s composed himself. It’s kind of a non-sequitur because yeah, Hollander never ran any projects out here so why would they even check, but at the same time, the Turks spend a lot of time cleaning up after R&D so maybe she’s just musing on some work story Zack doesn’t know about.

“I didn’t see him the first time I went in there,” Cissnei goes on. Her brow furrows and while she looks a lot calmer this time around, it obviously still bothers her just as much. “And then we saw a man in there that wasn’t there. Have you thought about that yet?”

“What, that something’s making us see things?” Zack says. “Aren’t we past that?”

It’s just an offhand comment, because to be honest, he hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about the how, which is clearly what she’s after. He’s still been thinking about the what, trying to nail down exactly what he thought he saw and what it actually turned out to be, but even as they’d started up to greet the forensic pathologist, he still couldn’t tell himself he was sure about it. He still can’t tell himself he’s sure. He didn’t think he was going to see it again once it’d vanished, fighter’s instincts telling him nothing in there was a threat, but he can’t say what the fuck it was and that’s still eating at him.

But somehow, he’s put it all together for Cissnei because she outright sags in relief on her stanchion. “Yes, exactly—good, I was afraid we weren’t on the same page there.”

“Hey, we’re doing the same investigation here,” Zack says. He’s genuinely surprised, although after a little thinking about it, not because she was worried but because she’s actually admitting it to him. She’s still a lot more rattled than she’s been letting on, he realizes. “I mean, you’re a Turk and I’m going to call you out on that when I think I need to, but I don’t see why you’d lie about not seeing Heidegger’s body.”

A brief flash goes through Cissnei’s eyes. He thinks it might be gratitude, but she goes on before he can confirm. “That little chip we found in the underside. You sending that to R&D?”

“Eventually,” Zack says. He’s hedging and she knows it and that looseness in her shoulders starts to go away. “They can’t test it locally, not for what we’ll want to know and—well, look, as far as I knew, it’s not like the Turks have their own little lab somewhere. Right?”

Her backbone straightens some more. She doesn’t exactly look mad at him, and anyway he just told her that he wasn’t being blind to things just because he’s applying common sense. But it looks like she’s wearing her uniform again rather than huddling in it. “No, but you don’t either. Right?”

“SOLDIER’s not going to sit on it, if that’s what you’re asking. We want to know too, it’s just—you agree we have to handle this a little carefully, don’t you?” Zack says as he tries to find a way to thread between mission objectives and reality. “Giving it straight to Hollander isn’t going to do that, even if he knows what the hell that thing is. And neither is either of us keeping it to ourselves, like that’s even going to work at this point.”

Cissnei’s lips start to move into a grimace, so she can’t argue on that point. But she’s a little slow to respond otherwise when he’s totally expecting her to pivot into asking him what scientists does SOLDIER know who wouldn’t do that, which is going to be a little harder to parry, since Zack tries to not outright lie most of the time.

Instead Cissnei says: “It looked like a chip of ore to me. Didn’t it?”

“Kind of,” Zack says, and this time the hedging sounds lame even to him. Even if it’s based a lot more on personal issues than policy ones. “I mean, yeah, it’s some kind of rock. But what kind, I’m not a geologist.”

“Well, I’m not either.” Cissnei pauses, then starts to look annoyed. “But this is an entire town based on geology, Zack. And none of them are assigned to R&D.”

“Oh…oh, right, but I thought you wanted to keep this under wraps,” Zack says, first wanting to smack his head against the nearest hard object for the miss and then frowning at her. “We can’t keep bringing people in. I mean, after a certain point we might as well set up a Classified 101 seminar.”

“And I bet Cloud’s already got slides waiting,” Cissnei pokes. But it’s just a swipe at the back, and she’s clearly already got eyes on the next turn ahead. “I know that, Zack, but we don’t need to tell people what we’re doing if we’re just pulling files. And poor Cloud doesn’t have to keep trying to find a backdoor if they’re stored locally. Corel does all of its own ore analysis, it doesn’t wait for Midgar to get back to them. If it’s from anywhere around here, they should have something on it. And if it’s not from around here, that tells us something too.”

“Cloud has nothing but respect for any and all infosec policies, I’ll have you know. I trained him myself and every time I hit our firewall, I give thanks for their efforts.” And then he overrides it and the Turks spy on him doing it, Zack doesn’t say but they both know. “Anyway, I’m on board. So what do you want to say, we’re just following up on the first set of bodies? That shaft’s degassing so much that we’re worried and want to know why it got shut down in the first place?”

Cissnei’s brows arch as she pushes off her stanchion. “Honestly, I was just going to walk into their records room when nobody was looking, but that works for me too. You can get all your chat out of your system.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a good chat. Chat is what lubricates the daily grind,” Zack protests.

He gets off his stanchion too since they can see a pair of headlights approaching in the distance. After a couple seconds it’s pretty clear that it’s Cloud coming back in their rental and Zack puts up an arm to wave. But the moment he does, the car abruptly swerves. Then it swerves back, and while it never came close to coming off the road—and it’s not like anyone else is on it, in either direction, for a country mile—that makes Zack frown and take a step forward.

Cissnei stays back but he can sense the wary, puzzled vibes coming off her and he puts out a hand to tell her he’s taking first stab at whatever is wrong. He can see Cloud now and the man looks tense, but both hands are on the wheel and no injuries are visible. Maybe Cloud was doing something else or was momentarily distracted by something and then saw Zack, but why he’d jump that much is a little…

Well, would be a little weird, if they hadn’t all just had a very weird, very unfun night, and weren’t now doubling down on a triple homicide with two more bodies, one of them a board-level executive. Nobody’s going to miss Heidegger except maybe his Gold Saucer account manager, but Public Security actually does do a lot of things—in spite of the guy—that are going to need to keep happening. And with the war with Wutai flaring up and most of SOLDIER committed to the border, everyone is going to want to know who’s taking care of the back door now. So if Cloud is stressed out, it’s not like he doesn’t have reason to be.

That said, he doesn’t usually react like that, so when he pulls up and hands out bags of steaming breakfast-burrito goodness he somehow found in this neck of Corel, Zack claps him on the back and then takes him aside. “So after we eat, we’re going to follow the pathologist back in and check out the local core samples,” Zack says, bringing him up to speed. “They’re still figuring out how to load the bodies so take your time. Not that I want to speak ill of the dead, but Heidegger’s not worth choking over.”

Cloud ducks his head but he’s not pressing his lips together against a smile or an eyeroll, or both, like is usual for him and Zack’s jokes. He opens his bag and partly unwraps the burrito inside, but doesn’t immediately start eating. “So we’re gonna reschedule the tour?”

“What—oh, did Dyne get back to us? He have an ETA now?” Zack says. Or tries to say; he reluctantly pulls the burrito, which is truly amazing in the way that food that’s at least fifty percent highly-processed mystery stuff is when it hits a hungry stomach after an all-nighter, out of his mouth and tries again. “I mean, even if he’s ready to go, we can’t make it there before…what, ten or eleven?”

“More like nine, the morning traffic’s already started. Mining shift changes two hours before the office opens,” Cloud says. He digs around in his pocket and then comes up with a napkin to help catch all the egg bits falling from Zack’s lips. “They’re not ready ready, but he thinks they could be by this afternoon. Does Cissnei know how long we’re going to need in Records?”

Zack takes the napkin and wipes off his mouth, then takes a swig of coffee to make sure that his throat is clear, too. “Probably not. I mean, I’m hoping there’s just a nice catalog with high-def photos of different kinds of ore, organized by the kind of hallucination they induce, but I don’t think that’s what your standard sample analysis report is going to look like.”

Cloud nods and then, still not showing any interest in his burrito, pulls out his phone. “I can tell them tomorrow morning is better. They have to rearrange things anyway since we missed their one free day.”

“They might appreciate having a little more time,” Zack nods. He sneaks a bite of his own burrito, because getting his blood sugar back up is a major contributor to clearing his mind. “But we’ll stand firm on that, you can say that. I don’t want them to think we’re flaky. Or wonder what the hell else we’re doing that’s more important…”

“Yeah,” Cloud mutters. He swipes away, gradually getting intent enough that he absently takes a seat on one of the stanchions—Cissnei went to eat inside where she could get something to put her coffee down on—and doesn’t notice Zack nudging his elbow so the burrito tilts towards his face rather than the lot. “Okay, I think that’s set—”

An incoming call alert goes across his screen. Zack’s not trying to peek at that but ends up seeing ‘Restricted’ on the screen and can’t help frowning. “Nobody’s trying to get around your out of office, right? Hendriksen’s briefed and she—”

Cloud jerks sharply away from Zack, yanking his phone towards himself as he does. His burrito starts to tip out of his hand and he hisses, scrabbling at both for a second. Then he gets a good hold on them again, only to have his eyes bulge when he realizes he’s sliding sideways off the stanchion.

Of course Zack doesn’t let that mess happen. He grabs the other man’s arm, pushes him back on the stanchion and while he’s at it, makes the burrito be higher than the phone. “Hey, whoa, Spike. Didn’t mean to freak you out. But seriously, if people aren’t going to Hendriksen or if she’s letting things slip, it is actually not your job right now to be the safety net.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” Cloud says. He doesn’t look at Zack and under the burrito Zack glimpses the phone twisting against Cloud’s lap. The screen is still lit, but then it goes dark just as Cloud twists that against his leg. “No, it’s not that. It’s not a big deal, Zack.”

Who blinks a little at the curt tone as he drops his hand from Cloud’s arm. Cloud doesn’t sound embarrassed so much as angry, and that’s not really like him. “Okay…well, still, you should eat something. You can tell whoever it is that it’s a direct order from me.”

Cloud nods, still without looking up. He shifts against the stanchion, then sticks his phone back in his pocket and starts to raise the burrito to his mouth. Then he lowers it and sighs and finally meets Zack’s eyes. “Sorry. It really wasn’t anything I needed to answer, I just…”

“Look, after last night I think we all get one free pass. I just want to make sure you’re not getting all wound up about some asshole back in Midgar, because one, not priority, and two, not priority,” Zack says firmly. He waits until Cloud nods again, this time with a tiny smile for him, and then returns to his own burrito. “We’ve got enough shit to get through here anyway.”

This time Cloud’s the one who looks as if Zack’s a little disturbing now, and Zack has to admit that that came out kind of bitter. He waves it off and Cloud seems to accept that, because they spend the next couple minutes eating in companionable silence.

But eventually Cloud clears his throat and gives Zack a concerned look. “This isn’t good, is it? First Wutai, then Heidegger, and we still don’t know what did the original three victims…people already think that SOLDIER is taking too long to deal with Wutai.”

“Well, they should go spend some time on the frontlines, see how easy it is to complain. Not like Wutai doesn’t have a thousand-year-old warrior culture or anything,” Zack snorts.

And now he sounds not only angry, but like he’s angry with Cloud who didn’t do anything. Zack exhales, then drinks some coffee and chases it with a mouthful of burrito that almost goes the wrong way. Then he stops himself and just…tries to be a sensible human being for a second. This is all kinds of fucked-up and Cloud’s right about the circling vultures waiting for another crack in SOLDIER, but he can’t let it get to him. If only because…he reminds himself that the four—well, five, fine, because whether Heidegger deserved it is completely unrelated to whether they need to know what happened to him—five dead people, he can do something about them. He can’t do anything about Wutai and Angeal or poor Aerith and her mother back in Midgar or all the people who’d like to make SOLDIER collateral damage in their stupid power plays, but he can do something here.

“I don’t want to spend forever trying to check into this rock, but if it’s got anything to do with what people are seeing when they do those seances, I want to check that first before I go into the mines,” Zack says.

Cloud looks up from his burrito, of which he’s put away a respective third. “You think that’s what’s causing the ghost?”

Zack pauses. He thinks he probably said a little too much there and it’s on the tip of his tongue to backtrack. But this is Cloud and not Cissnei, and to be honest, he’s also desperate to try and talk this out with someone. Usually he works better that way, but usually Angeal’s around and he can trust the man to both listen and also have seen something similar before.

But he can’t put it all on Angeal this time, and he shouldn’t be doing that so much anyway. Earn that First, he reminds himself. “They said this ghost in the old shaft is of Sephiroth, and Sephiroth had a pretty distinctive look from what we found,” he says. “The hair, the eyes, the height…I mean, the height was there. But I’m not sure how you’re supposed to tell about hair color with a ghost—aren’t they all kind of silver-white?”

“I think it depends on what movie you’re watching,” Cloud says.

Zack blinks, then laughs. He tips his burrito before taking another bite. “Yeah, okay, but…to me they didn’t—it didn’t look like someone had just turned down the color saturation. I could make out the uniform and that was definitely a pre-spinoff version—”

Cloud, who’d gone back to nosing at his food, looks up again. “It was?”

“Yeah, you can tell from the shoulderguards and how far down they come,” Zack says, drawing his hand across his upper arm to show the other man. “When SOLDIER was part of Public Security, it had to deal with Heidegger’s fashion sense too. But that was why it didn’t look blurry to me—I could make out the details, except for…”

And this is the part that kept coming back into his mind, both when he was trying to stay awake and when he wasn’t. Even now, going over it again just to figure out how to tell Cloud about it, Zack can’t help shifting on his feet.

“Something about the face—the eyes, mostly, I think. I guess the rest of the face was there but I didn’t really notice it. Like I actually couldn’t look at anything else, and then it was over…unless you saw anything?” Zack says.

He’s not nearly as hopeful as he sounds; if Cloud had, the man would’ve already said. But that’s his nerves again and he squashes them back under control as Cloud slowly shakes his head. “No, I just—that part I just saw from above, and I just—it was fast, I think all I got was someone in dark clothes jumping out and disappearing,” Cloud says.

Which was what he’d said before when the three of them had first compared notes. “Yeah, I just got—these eyes. They were…”

Then he trails off. He knows what he wants to say, except he…doesn’t really want to say it. He knows what he should say, that’s probably more accurate, and he knows he really should tell Cloud—and also Cissnei, because these are basic details and basic details are what run an investigation. And anyway, Zack still doesn’t think he believes this is completely supernatural; he’s seen a lot of insane stuff and heard about even more from Angeal and Genesis, and at the bottom of all of it has always been an actual living person. Just because magic exists in the world doesn’t mean that things don’t eventually make sense, as Angeal says.

But something about this just has gotten to him, he admits. It’s almost like if he makes it make sense, it’s going to be worse for him, that’s what he feels and that’s what’s making him hesitate, and that is just completely stupid.

“Sephiroth’s file said he had green eyes,” Cloud says, which makes Zack realize how long he’s left the other man hanging.

“Yeah. Yeah, I remember that part. But I… can’t remember what color they were,” Zack says before he can twist himself up over it more. Then he takes a deep breath. It goes on a little longer than he’d expected and he slurps some coffee to push away the fact that he doesn’t feel as unburdened as he thinks he should. “I don’t think I can say it looked like Sephiroth, to be honest, because I can’t remember the face—just the eyes and I can’t really remember them either. Just that they were glowing in the dark like this is some scary cartoon, I don’t know.”

Cloud, on the other hand, looks like Zack somehow made him feel better. “So did the flying one,” he mutters. “I think. I only got a quick look before it was past me—oh, hey, so I did get Dr. Valentine’s last security clearance application. It doesn’t come with a photo and it’s dated two years before he…whatever happened to him, but it has some stats. He was pretty tall too, just over six feet.”

“Eye color?” Zack asks, mostly joking.

“Brown,” Cloud says, with a little nod because he gets the joke.

“Well, I guess maybe if ghosts get to change their wardrobe, we might not have multiple stories floating around after all,” Zack says. Again, not that seriously, although he wouldn’t bet on being able to guess exactly how tall the figure in the cockpit had been aside from definitely past six. And he’s tempted to leave it at that—it’d be easier to leave it at that. But not…not what he’s here to do. “But the thing is, it wasn’t really the eyes that got to me, Spike. It…was like…I was hearing something in my head when it was looking at me.”

Cloud doesn’t say anything. Zack is staring into his coffee, still half-thinking whether he wants to go down this road, so initially he doesn’t think about that. But when he finally pulls himself together and looks up, he startles at how intently Cloud is staring at him. Cloud himself doesn’t look unnerved but…it is actually a little unnerving how focused Cloud is.

“What did it sound like?” Cloud asks. His voice is barely above a whisper.

“Like—” last chance, a small, twitching part of Zack’s brain says, which he firmly quashes because he didn’t join SOLDIER to run away from the hard things “—like a woman, actually. I couldn’t hear what she was saying—it was just maybe a word or two and it was like she was really far off. And for some reason I didn’t think it was coming from the—from the one in the cockpit. I think—I thought that one actually started disappearing when I heard her, but then Cissnei shot at them.”

Dr. Valentine had had a dead wife people thought he was trying to chase around in the mines, and that had sounded more like the kind of thing bored and overworked people would try and call up during a séance, rather than a missing SOLDIER people barely remembered in Midgar. That’s what Zack expects Cloud to immediately point out, but instead the other man just keeps staring at him.

Zack shifts back against his stanchion, then takes a bite of his burrito. Then grimaces at how cold and unpleasantly greasy the egg filling is now; he hadn’t realized they’d been at this for that long. He stuffs the remaining bite into his mouth and swallows it down with the last of his coffee, then looks back at Cloud who is still…Zack shakes his head. “That’s it. Nothing came up later, and it just doesn’t—if that chip is some hallucinogenic rock that makes people see old horror movies, that’d actually make the most sense so far. Cissnei saw something too, after all.”

Cloud blinks once. Then he shivers a little and fidgets with his burrito. He starts to say something along the lines of Cissnei not giving them that much there, but then stops that in favor of pulling out his phone. “I’m still following up some things on Valentine. I did have his wife in there but I can push harder—Sephiroth didn’t have any family on file, but I can check that again too.”

“Yeah, sounds good.” Zack pushes off the stanchion and goes over to the other man, then squeezes his shoulder. “Just don’t let Midgar pull you out. This is our mission, Spike, not their problems.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know,” Cloud says.

He twists a little away from Zack, still swiping, but it’s so he can use his other hand to feed the rest of his burrito into his mouth. Cissnei’s standing at the other side of the lot and waving at them, so Zack tugs the other man along but makes sure he doesn’t interfere with that either. Cloud will pay attention to what he needs to, Zack knows, and they’ve got plenty here to do.

Chapter 16: Present

After breakfast, Zack and Cissnei check in with the pathologist, but the man can’t tell them anything about the bodies that their eyes didn’t already tell them. It seems like anything useful will have to wait till they can get a trusted lab on it, so they leave him to babysit the bodies and the plane. In the meantime, Cloud’s gotten the mine tour rescheduled, so they have most of the day once they get back into Corel proper to go through the on-site records. Corel’s behind in digitizing so anything older than about five years is still going to be on paper. “But this way it’s right there with the ore samples too, since nobody’s really figured out a good way to transfer those into a computer,” laughs the man who shows them down to the archives room.

Rooms, actually. Records going back ten years are in the main building, just stuffed way down in the basement, while anything older is in a warehouse on the edge of town. Zack initially isn’t sure why Cissnei is thinking of going that far back, but she explains once the archive manager has left.

“I heard from Rude. Vincent Valentine was a Turk way back during Veld’s time,” she says, and then pauses. “Veld was the head before Tseng.”

“Oh, okay,” Zack says. “Just needed a sec to wrap my head around the idea that they don’t just buff Tseng up at the factory every ten years.”

Cissnei rolls her eyes, but it wasn’t like either of them were around for that. Tseng was leading the Turks when Angeal and Genesis got up here from Banora, and unlike with SOLDIER nobody ever talks about a before and after when it comes to that department. They’re just the Turks.

“I didn’t get a ton else except that he was the son of this Dr. Valentine you heard about, and like I said, Dr. Valentine was actually originally from Corel to begin with. He went off for school in a couple different places and then was doing research on the Northern Continent before he came home,” Cissnei says. She pulls out her phone, checks something, and then puts it back in her pocket. “Vincent died way before that ghost story you heard happened, but his father was still working here for almost two decades after that. So if there’s any kind of link back to that, we need to look earlier than Sephiroth’s mission.”

Zack almost asks Cissnei what she thinks the link is, aside from hallucinations, but she turns and briskly walks over to the nearest set of shelves before he can. She’s already half in them when she calls back what time interval she’ll start with, and tells them which ones they can do.

“Guess she’s running this?” Zack mutters. Not that he has an issue with the idea of splitting up the work or how she’s proposing they do that, but she’s back to being unilateral about it and he’s getting tired of it.

“I think she’s still weirded out by yesterday too,” Cloud says quietly.

Zack looks at him, then back at Cissnei, who is running one hand slowly along a shelf of boxes, brow furrowed in concentration at the labels she’s reading. Her other hand’s loose at her side, not clamped around a phone or hitching towards one of her guns.

“How do you figure?” Zack replies just as quietly. He hooks his chin over at the shelves where they’ll need to start, then follows Cloud to them.

“Because she said a couple things.” Cloud gets into the shelves before turning around. He looks a little guilty. “It was when you were in the plane showing the pathologist where Heidegger was lying before. It wasn’t much and then you came down and said we should go get something to eat, and you looked hungry.”

“You mean I was getting my hunger jitters on,” Zack says knowingly. The records are organized by quarters of the year and region, and while they’re all looking for the same quarter, they’d agreed that due to the spread of relevant sites, they’d have to check the samples for multiple regions. Zack finds the right set of shelves for their region and starts at head-height while positioning himself so Cloud can simultaneously check the boxes down at the bottom. “Good call, I needed calories and caffeine first. So what’d she say?”

Cloud grunts a couple times. When Zack looks down, the other man is using the heel of his hand to dust off the front labels of some of the boxes. “That she still doesn’t get why she didn’t see Heidegger to begin with, because the Turks never had to sign up to Hollander’s stuff, they were all clean there. Then she stopped—I’m pretty sure she didn’t mean to say that in front of me. She was finishing up messaging someone and I interrupted her by accident, and she looked a little weird about it so I asked if she was okay. Then she just said that.”

“Well, that’s rude,” is Zack’s immediate reaction. Fine, a lot of people give SOLDIER the side-eye for their enhancements even if SOLDIER is the muscle that keeps Shinra on its feet, but the Turks aren’t exactly normal either. Zack isn’t sure what they get in their morning smoothies, but they can keep up with a First, even Reno with a hangover, and you can’t do that on just fiber and bananas.

But then he thinks about it while he’s translating the label abbreviations to their full dates and contents—ore samples get stuck in the same boxes as the engineering reports and there’s a lot more engineering going on at any given time than just ore analysis—and it’s uncharacteristic of Cissnei. She’s not a SOLDIER fangirl by any means, but Zack’s worked with her enough times to observe that she doesn’t usually throw shade at them from that angle.

“I think she meant it more like she was sympathizing with us. Maybe,” Cloud replies, as if he’s having the same qualms. “She didn’t sound grossed out at us, more at R&D. Like maybe she’s thinking they’ve been slipping the Turks something without saying.”

“Well, that’s definitely going to ruin her image of Tseng,” Zack notes. “He’s basically what she wants to be in ten years but that would be a pretty major slip on his side.”

Cloud makes a noncommittal noise. They work along the shelf and then Cloud taps Zack on the shin to signal he’s found a box. Zack steps out of the way so Cloud can pull it out, but when he sees the label, he sighs and goes up two shelves to keep checking, since that box is only going to cover a month’s worth.

“What if it was further back?” Cloud asks. Abruptly but quietly, and when Zack checks, the man has the box open and is bent over it, carefully sliding out files and checking each. “Back when it wasn’t Tseng but this other—Veld. That’d be far enough back to be Hojo’s time too.”

“You think that’s how this is all connected?” Zack says.

He stops and thinks about it. Sephiroth was from Hojo’s take on SOLDIER, they know that, but aside from being at the same time, the Valentine part hasn’t had any strong connection to Hojo. So far, anyway, but if there had been a Hojo project going on in Corel too, and maybe it’d somehow gotten into the Turks at that time, like this Vincent…but then again, Vincent wasn’t in Corel, and also was way before Cissnei so how would it carry down to her? Zack can understand her being touchy considering how touchy he’s been himself, but there are still a lot of holes.

“I don’t know,” Cloud says, and he sure sounds as if he thinks it’s pretty out there. But there’s something else in his voice as well, something that makes Zack take yet another look at him. And think about how Cloud had stared at him at the parking lot, for some reason. “Back in Nibelheim…”

Cloud takes in a breath as if he’s going to say more, but then he instead pulls the box he’s currently working on towards himself. He puts his hand on the files, doesn’t poke its fingers down as if he would to take one out, and just sits like that for a moment, his head pointed slightly down so he’s looking at the shelves instead of Zack.

Sometimes he gets like this when Nibelheim comes up. Growing up in a small, rural town isn’t always an easy ride, Zack knows that from firsthand experience, and he at least had a big supportive family versus Cloud’s single mother and the hints of social network drama about that that Cloud’s let slip from time to time. So Zack just gives the man a minute or so to work through it. He goes back to his shelf and makes sure that it’s clear of any potentials, then takes a step down to the next bookcase over and that’s when Cloud inhales again.

“Hojo did still get a lab. He wasn’t supposed to do anything in there, and I know they had guards and spies and all that round the clock on him, but he was in there till late, a lot, and people said supplies went in and empty boxes came back out,” Cloud says. It’s all delivered in a flat, measured tone like he’s just reading off a report, but the breath he takes at the end is a little more of a tell. “And it was the same lab he had before he went to Midgar—when he was just starting out. That was way before I was born but people still remembered. Said you didn’t go anywhere near there, said it wasn’t a good idea for him to notice if you had kids. And they started saying that again for the year he was back.”

“Right. The bad old days of R&D. I mean, not like they aren’t still, but at least they have to wait till you’re sixteen and signed some kind of consent form,” Zack says. Trying to lighten the mood a little, just on reflex, because suddenly the bookcases seem way too narrow and airless. “Honestly, an undiscovered Hojo project would explain a lot. I guess I’m just—I never heard that he did much along the way of geology. He was a genetics guy.”

Cloud shrugs. He doesn’t seem cheered up but also doesn’t seem offended. “Yeah, but the lab was right up against the mountain and not that far from the reactor. I think they used to say don’t eat any of the snow downhill of there, just in case.”

“Well, shouldn’t you not eat the snow, period? Even if it’s nice and white, you still don’t know who messed with those clouds before they dumped it,” Zack says.

A tiny snort escapes from Cloud and just like that, the mood gets better. “You get the snow to melt when your well’s frozen over and you don’t want to climb down it with an ax, Zack,” he says, tugging out a file.

He opens it up and starts reading it. Zack says something generically agreeable and then finds a box to check on his shelf, so he does that.

For the next hour or so, they work through the entire aisle, both sides. Every so often, they’ll find an ore sample in the right time frame and region, but when they pull it out, either they can tell right away that it looks nothing like that chip in the plane’s storage compartment or they read the report and the report says it’s been identified as existing mineral whatever. If it’s identifiable, Zack figures that means nobody had any unexplained experiences around it, so they move on.

They regroup at the hour mark with Cissnei, who similarly has no good hits. That’s taken them through all possible reports for the year before Sephiroth went to Corel, which seems like a reasonable time span. So if they want to look up anything else, they’ll have to go out to this warehouse and check the files from Dr. Valentine’s time.

“Well, there’s one more region we didn’t look at,” Cloud says right after Zack suggests they go. He looks at Zack, who nods to keep going—if Zack missed something, he missed it and isn’t going to stand on his pride about it—and then explains. “We didn’t look where Eleanor said Dr. Valentine had his accident.”

“But that was way before any of the ghost stories,” Zack says.

“Still, if he’s related at all, it makes sense to check that one too,” Cissnei immediately responds. “We’re checking all the others for both time periods.”

Zack can’t argue with that, and anyway he’s not really that enthusiastic about going out to the warehouse—at least here there’s a coffee machine right outside—so he shrugs. Since they don’t need all three of them to go check that set of shelves, he volunteers to go find the archives manager and tell the man they’re wrapping up.

That only takes him a couple minutes since the man’s office is down the hall and amazingly, he’s in it when Zack knocks on the door. “Just checking that we can get you the temp keycards,” the manager says as he finishes up an email. “We’ve been running low on blanks so we’ve been trying to just reprogram them, since there’s the rations order on.”

“Appreciate your contribution,” Zack says.

The manager blinks hard, like he’d somehow forgotten which department the rations order is primarily supporting. There’s maybe a second where he shows a little chagrin even though it didn’t come out like a complaint, and then he moves on. “I think we can go get them in fifteen minutes or so? Then I can take you to the warehouse or give you the directions to get there, whatever you’d like, Commander.”

“We’ve got a car and I don’t want to take you from your work for that long,” Zack says. “Directions are fine.”

The manager nods and riffles through the papers on his desk till he finds one sheet that he hands to Zack. “Here you go. Sorry we didn’t have what you needed here, but we just don’t usually have a need to revisit samples that old.”

“It’s fine, I get it,” Zack says. He looks over the directions and they seem pretty straightforward, except that of course none of these street names are actually going to have easily-visible signs. But it’s really not that far and they should be able to figure it out so long as they get to the right neighborhood. “The project they’re related to didn’t seem to be a major one or a priority either, so that makes sense.”

They hadn’t given the manager a lot of details about why they needed the reports and the manager hadn’t seemed inclined to ask questions, but he looks curious now, maybe because Zack isn’t with Cissnei. “Sorry if this is violating security clearances, Commander, but do you know who was the project lead? It still probably won’t save you a trip out to the warehouse, but I might be able to narrow down how many crates you need to open up.”

Zack smiles politely to buy himself a second and then thinks through it. The locals know they’re here because of the three dead people, but not what leads they’re investigating. Sephiroth is an obvious restricted topic because of SOLDIER, and especially now because Heidegger’s dead, but Valentine…still seems a little unrelated. And maybe he can spin this so it’s just a query parameter. “Honestly, we don’t really have a lot of names—there’s just this one R&D person who temped on it but we don’t think he was a lead—Valentine? If he wasn’t a lead, I don’t want to restrict…”

He stops because of the way the manager’s face changed. It isn’t exactly like the man is going to jump out of his chair, but he does look like Zack just walked into a meeting about salads and pulled out a big bloody hunk of steak. Then the man composes himself a little. “Sorry about that, Commander. I…Dr. Valentine, right, he did work here for a long time on a lot of things. A little before me, so you would have to look in the warehouse or—well, the warehouse would have the ore reports.”

“But what else is there?” Zack says, not missing the ‘or.’ And the way the man had twitched again.

“I—” the manager shakes his head, and then something about the way his eyes drop reminds Zack of…Eleanor “…well, coming from Midgar, you’ll think this is just ignorant locals, and I never believed in it myself but you do what you’re told.”

“Hey, I am absolutely not here to laugh at anyone when it comes to keeping people safe,” Zack says. He leans in a little, just enough to get the man to look up, and then holds his gaze. “If it could be relevant, I’d like to know about it. It might help us find out what we need to stop people from dying.”

Though unlike Eleanor, the manager seems to shake off his embarrassment a bit quicker and to just move into professional mode. “Valentine had an office up on the sixth floor. They locked it up after he resigned and it’s still locked up—I’m not exactly sure why, but we haven’t needed the space so no one’s been crying for it. Any work files would’ve been cleaned out of there and sent to the warehouse, of course, and I’d still advise you to check there first for what you’re looking for. But I just happened to remember about that.”

And that the story here is he resigned, Zack notes. “Guess he didn’t have much of a going-away party if nobody wanted his office.”

That flicker of caution mixed with embarrassment goes over the manager’s face again. “I think they’d downsized his team so it was pretty much just him at that point, and he was going on sick leave a lot and the rumor was he was unlucky—but honestly, it was before me and miners just get superstitious about the strangest things. There are other reasons why nobody ever used his office again, and I just don’t think you should take that too seriously.”

“Yeah, no problem, I’ll do my own research,” Zack says. He smiles to put the other man at ease, then nods out towards the hall. “But is there any way I can take a look at the office, since we’re here? Just in case something catches my eye. Any reason why it’d be a problem?”

“I…” the manager glances quickly back at his computer as if he’s about to offer an excuse for why not, but then he seems to think of something else “…well, that doesn’t fall under me but Facilities should have some kind of way in since they have master keycards. Or they can always break down the door for you if you really think it’s that critical.”

Zack inwardly sighs. For a second there…but this is about par for the course when it comes to support staff. To be honest, the Corel personnel so far have been a lot more helpful than he’s used to, so that had to run short sooner or later. “Okay, I’ll look into it. Than—”

“I can just show you where it is while Facilities is coming up. That’s all I can do, but if you have a minute…” the manager offers.

“Sure!” Zack says.

He shoots off a quick text to Cloud, who messages back that they found a box and still have half of it to go through, and then hustles the archive manager to the elevator before the man can change his mind. Along the way, the manager tentatively pokes around for updates on the investigation and offers up that most people aren’t too worried yet because they all think the deaths were probably down to something the three victims picked up in that abandoned mine and they, meaning the manager, know better than to go over there.

“That area’s been marked as a hazard for as long as I can remember, and since R&D withdrew most of their resources, nobody can go figure out if it’s because of some rare poison that’s in the rock,” the man says. Then he flushes and hastily shakes his head. “I’m not saying anyone should, and it makes sense to put your people where they can do the most. We’re miners here, and if it’s not good to mine, then it’s not like we need to know more.”

Now he’s nervous he’s going to be reported for accidentally slamming Shinra. Zack changes the subject to the amazing casserole Eleanor had packed up for them yesterday and for the next few minutes, the manager happily gives Zack some tips on other places to try because he has that casserole at least once a week and feels the love. That gets them onto the floor, and then they’re standing in front of a door.

“This is it,” the manager proclaims awkwardly. “And this is as far as I can take you. I did contact Facilities but they haven’t gotten back to me yet.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s fine,” Zack says.

It’s…a door. Nothing special about it, except…he does notice that there’s a slanted box for mail on the wall next to it. The box still has a label and when he looks closer, he can make out the faded name on it: Grimoire Valentine.

The office is one of three in a short dogleg off the main hall. The other two offices have their lights off, but they passed people and open doors in the hall, and just then someone at the other end of the dogleg sees them and calls out a hello. The archive manager returns it and walks up to them, chatting about some firework show coming up in a week.

Zack is just getting a photo of the mailbox label with his phone so he doesn’t turn when the manager does. He texts the photo to Cloud and then he—but he stops midway through his pivot and stares at the door again. It’s solid except for a little window in the center of the top third, but the glass is frosted so the inside of the office isn’t visible through it. Zack can just tell whether the light inside is on or not, and the light isn’t on…but something had moved in there.

The thing is, the doors aren’t that thick, and Zack has enhanced hearing. He should be able to tell if anyone is inside the room just by concentrating, but he can’t pick up any breathing or other telltale noises. It might have been just his shadow flicking past his peripheral vision…he puts his hand on the door, but then takes it back. He’s not sure enough to make a scene, and he doesn’t have to go to Facilities to break down the door but that would definitely cause a scene.

So he takes a step back while still looking at the door and pulls his phone out again.

About fifteen minutes later, Cloud and Cissnei join him. Cloud nods when Zack asks whether they finished up in the basement first, and his glum face tells Zack the answer to the unspoken second question of whether they’d found anything. Cissnei barely stops to say ‘that one?’ before she walks up to the door, does something to it that she blocks from Zack’s view with her body, and then pushes the door open.

Zack sent the manager off before Cloud and Cissnei got here, and no onlookers are gathered at the end of the dogleg. “But we should probably not spend a ton of time here. You want to do an inch-by-inch, we can always come back later now that we know we’ve got an in.”

“You’re welcome,” Cissnei drawls, still busier looking around than paying attention to Zack.

There’s not really anything to justify the attention. It’s a plain, bare office, with a desk and a chair and a lot of dust but not much else. “Guess we’re going to the warehouse,” Cloud mutters.

He moves back to the doorway as Zack comes in, silently signaling that he’ll keep an eye out on the hall traffic. Zack nods back and then goes to the desk where Cissnei is checking each drawer. She’s not turning up anything and Zack is not seeing anything that could’ve made that movement, but then he knew that as soon as the door had opened, same as he knew that thing in the cockpit had left for the night.

Which doesn’t really make him that comfortable. He looks around because he needs to look around, but to be honest, he’s glad there isn’t anything to justify them sticking around. They can just go to the warehouse and keep trying to find something in the reports—and of course that’s when he spots it.

On the wall is a set of shelves. The dust layer on one looks a little different in one corner, and when he goes and pokes, he turns up a small framed photo. It’s the kind of thing people stick on the corner of their desk for family photos, and when the glass is clean, it does seem to be that: a man and a woman, posing next to each other in front of part of the mountainside.

“That’s Grimoire Valentine,” Cissnei says, looking over Zack’s shoulder.

And when did you pull that should be what Zack asks, since Cloud got the man’s HR file but without any headshots. Instead what he says is: “Lucrecia?”

“Her?” Cissnei says, and then she gives Zack a sharp, hard look. “So Cloud managed to dig that up? You ever planning to share?”

“Hey,” Cloud says because yes, he is there. But actually he doesn’t seem to be objecting to Cissnei’s hypocrisy, but gesturing to something in the hall.

Cissnei grabs the photo from Zack, who should protest that but who doesn’t. They go out of the office to find their liaison coming towards them with an anxious expression. And then it’s ten minutes of pretending like they haven’t been out of touch with him for almost twenty-four hours and doing a ton of stuff but genuinely trying to explain to him he’s not in trouble for all of that and Midgar isn’t going to send a whole battalion in retaliation. Cissnei carries a lot of the alibi development but Zack has to drop the orders to just move on and go to the warehouse.

And they do go. Their liaison comes along and rustles up a team to help efficiently pull boxes once they’re at the warehouse, which means Zack and Cloud and Cissnei are all busy managing people for a couple hours. So Zack doesn’t actually get a second to go over what happened in the office till lunch break, and it ends up being with Cissnei because Cloud went to go get their lunch.

“Did you know about Lucrecia when you flew out?” she asks him point-blank.

“Honestly, no,” Zack says. Then raises a brow when she doesn’t challenge that. “Happy to share?”

Surprisingly, Cissnei actually looks a little ashamed of herself. “Look, I saw your face and I have to admit you’re almost as good as Reno when it comes to improvising a story, but you’re not actually a born liar. So what was that back there?”

“First tell me what you know,” Zack says.

Cissnei draws back a little, annoyed, but then…actually explains. “Lucrecia Crescent. Low-level R&D, worked in Valentine’s lab for a while, then went to Hojo’s lab. It only came up because Vincent got himself assigned there to be her bodyguard and something—he died, she ran off, sounded like a bad break-up that screwed up surveillance on Hojo for a couple weeks from what Rude told me. I didn’t really think that much of it but why would Vincent’s father have a photo of them together?”

“I have no fucking idea,” Zack says. Loudly and defensively, and he is good at improvising but even he knows he can’t cover up something that obvious. So he takes a deep breath and just admits as much as he hopes he needs to. “We just started looking into Valentine ourselves. Cloud wasn’t keeping back anything—we’re not, okay, we’re still trying to actually do an investigation here. But there’s stuff coming back all the time and I’ll admit we haven’t had time to sit down and really think about what we have so far. So when I saw that I just said her name, I wasn’t really thinking about it. It wasn’t a plot, Cissnei.”

Which is all true. And she sees that and the irritation in her eyes fades. “Yeah, we should really do that, sit down and go over things. After this—I still think figuring out if that piece of rock came from around here is important.”

“Agreed. That’s a solid link,” Zack says.

So they sit down and talk about how to assign work out for the afternoon, and then Cloud brings in lunch and they eat. And it makes Zack feel a lot better even though he remembers Cissnei’s got her own job and they’re all doing this under the shadow of the escalation with Wutai. But he’s getting things done and moving them forward, and doing it with people who also want to make that happen, even if it’s not for the same reasons. It feels like he’s helping.

So he doesn’t have to think about how he knew the name of the woman in the photo—how he’d heard her name in his head and how the hell that might have happened. And he doesn’t have to think about what else that might have sounded like, when he’s talking to the others. He just needs to talk.

Chapter 17: Past

According to the geological reports Valentine has assembled, every so often the miners will run into a strange type of rock that doesn’t behave exactly like materia ore, but that has several similarities, including the ability to act as a power source. However, and unlike Mako, the power-generating capacity of the raw material tends to fluctuate wildly, and weakens or even disappears completely if it’s processed to try and concentrate the active element.

The miners long ago labeled it a waste and a nuisance, because its other unfortunate—to them—quality is that it also leaches away any useful properties from other minerals when processed together. So whenever they find it, they mark the spot and then isolate it from the other workings to avoid contamination. Naturally, it hadn’t been well-studied until Valentine took an interest in it.

Since the ore appears very haphazardly and only in a few known, widely-separated areas of the world—the Northern Crater being the other place where it exists in more than trivial amounts—Valentine started to theorize that it wasn’t formed via normal geological processes but was the product of some sort of artificial occurrence. Namely, leavings from an in-person appearance by Chaos, since that entity is known to cause magical distortions of all kinds. He’s left handwritten notes over many of the reports indicating he personally investigated the areas from which the underlying ore sample was taken.

But he didn’t seem to make much progress with that until Sephiroth’s mother came into the picture. A small number of the reports also carry notations from her, which make Sephiroth stop and scrabble through her other notes so that he can rework his understanding of how they all connect with each other. She hadn’t had a background in geology any more than Valentine had when first starting out, but she had solid training in data analysis, and that had let her find patterns in the site data and eventually, had let her propose a timeline for Chaos’ visits.

Sephiroth can barely keep his eyes open at that point, even after forcing himself to eat and drink some of his reserved supply. His head is drooping to his chest and when he puts his hand up under his chin to prop it, he finds that only encourages the drooping. So he lies down on the pad and covers himself up with the blanket, but pulls over a sheet scribbled over with her notes to try and squeeze in one more page.

She truly was an unsung genius, able to apply her skills to different disciplines and come up with results others had missed. And always in service to someone else’s goals, Sephiroth thinks with a bitter twist to his mouth—true, Valentine does pepper his papers with credits to her, but even so, it’s very clear that the two of them had been chasing his lifelong dream.

What had been hers? Had she ever dared to have one, Sephiroth can’t help wondering. Her entries from after her escape from Hojo detail numerous regrets, many of them related to leaving Sephiroth behind…but as vindicating as it feels to read those, Sephiroth hasn’t failed to miss how there are absolutely no mentions of family matters in her notes from before Nibelheim. There are hints of a strong admiration for Valentine, but those seem inextricably intertwined with how best to help with his work.

Of course Sephiroth knows full well what it’s like to work under constant surveillance and to have to couch even the most mundane desires in ridiculous terms to avoid issues. But her after-Nibelheim notes have so many personal details that they verge on a diary, and it makes him wonder if she’d kept anything similar before, but in a separate document—and if Valentine’s going to deliver it at some point, once he’s judged Sephiroth has been sufficiently indoctrinated to his theory. That seems the most likely scheme, even if his ideas are more benign than Hojo’s.

“Still his damned dream,” Sephiroth mutters under his breath. “Not hers.”

His eyes are closing, and each time he forces them open again, they do that a little less. He’s losing the battle against sleep, he realizes that…but he tries anyway. And there is that sigh from the other corner that briefly spurs him to greater wakefulness, although not enough to make him raise his head.

But Vincent doesn’t show up to offer another round of biased, cryptic commentary. Sephiroth listens for it, for anything, since as grudging as he is to admit it, he’d like to know what the other man thinks of all of this. Vincent had met her too, and he probably knows things about her that aren’t in her writings or filtered through his father’s guilt-colored reflections, and Sephiroth—Sephiroth wants to know her. He’s always wanted to know her, always wanted to know not only that she’d thought of him as more than a means to an end but wanted to know her. He knows far too well what Hojo has contributed to him, and has, as long as he’s been able to think independently, been determined to whittle that down to the minimum. But that leaves so much space to fill and it’s so…tiring, to come up with all of it himself. He’d like to know that his mother had given him something too. Had helped him too.

She’d given so much to other men. Lesser men, and Sephiroth doesn’t think it’s overweening pride in himself to say so, having observed their failings. So much to them, and…what to him…

In this dark, dark, silent place. As dark as night, and nothing to tell him whether up is up or up is actually down, whether it’s yesterday or tomorrow or years before. He can’t see any of it anymore and so it becomes very confusing, how the memories blur together. Sometimes he thinks it’s so long ago that all he has to do is wake up and then he’ll see them together again, when it was warm and bright and everything was still yet to come.

All the data, yet to be looked at, and somehow it’s also spilling through him in an endless torrent. He can’t turn away from it, can only drown in it and then watch it all around him as he sees the patterns take shape, grow noisy and then dissolve back into meaningless numbers. He used to be good at this—used to see—

See what Sephiroth thinks and there’s…a kind of ripple. Not violent, not a tear, not like when she was ripping through his mind, trampling what she didn’t devour to clear the way for her own thoughts, make it fertile gore for nurturing them. More like the data itself, how the patterns change and flow rather than split into two, him and her.

This she thinks and though he can distinctly feel the separation between their minds, he has no sense of body here. But nonetheless she directs his attention to the data, to the numbers slipping past them in a near-incomprehensible flood, and somehow also she manages to draw rivulets through the stream so his eye follows certain ones. This.

“This,” Vincent says.

Sephiroth jerks on the pad. His eyes have been open for a while, he can tell by how they itch when he blinks now, but somehow he hadn’t registered the other man. Vincent is squatting up by the bars again, one hand slipped through to just touch the edges of a stack of papers.

“She showed me.” He pulls back his hand, then spasms just as it’s going through the bars. It’s his left hand and when its plates knock against the metal, they ring so painfully that Vincent and Sephiroth both wince. And then Vincent keeps wincing, abruptly dropping his head to grind it against the bars as he hisses. “Showed me, but I can’t—I never could read it, she was reading it off and telling me. She—she never told Father all—”

He might be fighting a transformation. His muscles seem to be knotting and bunching far more than a normal man’s should, so at first Sephiroth remains crouched at the back of the cell. And wary of Jenova too, of any sign of her return to ravage his mind…but that hadn’t been what had just happened. That hadn’t been her, and as Vincent jerks his head back and forth and breathes heavily but remains human, Sephiroth starts to shake off his initial defensive passiveness. What else could be bothering Vincent, why had he—how had he known to interrupt that dream—

No, not just a dream. He still can recall those numbers, and he still—he looks sharply at Vincent. The man is in clear pain, yes, but there’s no sense of that doubled presence. It’s only him that Sephiroth can hear. And he doesn’t appear to be eager to attack, but something had drawn him out, even if it wasn’t Jenova. Something had, and Sephiroth had…dreamed about his mother. “You spoke to—my mother, you mean my mother. Was this back in Nibelheim?”

Vincent goes perfectly still. It’s difficult to even detect any signs of breathing—visually. But Sephiroth can hear it.

“You said he was in love with her, your father,” Sephiroth mutters. He pushes himself up, tries to bring his thoughts back in order. He had been sleeping, and his mind hasn’t quite shifted back to the waking world…but he hadn’t been merely dreaming, he knows that the same way that he knows when Vincent is or isn’t speaking for Chaos too. “She went—went there, because Hojo tried to kill him, and she wanted to find a way to…undo that. Heal him. But you went too and you met her there, and talked her into getting revenge for him…”

There’s a low, uneven noise. Initially Sephiroth thinks Vincent is scratching at the ground or grinding his arm against the bars because of how rough it sounds, but when he sees that the man’s hands are still, he realizes Vincent is making it himself, in his throat.

Laughing. And while the man’s bizarre mannerisms had previously struck Sephiroth as incomprehensibly alien when they weren’t simply infuriating, something about him now feels mundanely familiar. Because something in Sephiroth has wanted to do the same on more than one occasion, knowing the prices he has to pay for what he wants are far out of proportion and yet knowing no other way. Having to know that, because it’s occurred more than once to him that his intelligence is also why he can’t help wanting more.

“That was why, wasn’t it?” Sephiroth says. “It wasn’t just clearing her name, it was trying to get Hojo too. For your father. Wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” The word rasps gutturally out of Vincent. Then he abruptly slumps against the bars, as if that effort was the climax of all that struggling. “Yes, it was…he’s my father. There’s no one else on his side but me, and I—I joined the Turks, I could never go to my mother’s…but he still took my calls. I wouldn’t take his but he took mine, and when Hojo—I don’t care how brilliant the man is, he has no right to kill a man just for disagreeing with him.”

Which makes Sephiroth laugh himself. “Of course not, which is exactly why he resorts to blackmail and threats.”

But Vincent doesn’t seem to hear him. In fact, as the man rambles on, Sephiroth isn’t entirely certain that Vincent still knows who he’s speaking to, or perhaps even that he’s speaking aloud. “I killed for reasons. Good or bad reasons but they’re reasons, but that was—if that’s all it takes anymore, then someone should do the same to him. But she wanted more, she didn’t just want to get him to admit what he did. Before he died she wanted him to know…how wrong…because she thought he was wrong and Father was right. She thought she was right, and she wanted him to know, so he’d die knowing…but then I think at the end she thought maybe they were all wrong…”

And the tone of his voice changes too. Still burdened but also bewildered in a way that has less to do with not understanding what he’s saying, but why he is saying it. And then Sephiroth thinks he understands. “Did you love her?”

Vincent stops talking. But he doesn’t go still again; he almost immediately drags up his head to stare at Sephiroth and suddenly Sephiroth is certain that Vincent meant to tell him this the entire time, that the man has been planning this. “I might’ve said that, and maybe it was to get her to go along but maybe also I felt sorry, getting to know her, but…” his left hand rises and then wavers in the air, tracing an indistinct shape “…the problem is when you work together on something like that, everything riding on it, when you really want it at any cost, it’s hard to keep things apart—then it was worse when I merged with Chaos. She did it to save me, to keep me alive so I could help her get out but I wasn’t the same and I—she tried but I couldn’t tell half the time who it was, couldn’t tell her or me. You think the same but feel different, or think different but it feels the same and you can’t tell—you can’t tell who. Father had to make it stop just so I could—so I could start to tell again.”

Back to the nonsense, says one part of Sephiroth. But another part, and admittedly it might be the part that’s been worn down by fatigue and betrayal and the slow, insidious seep of an alien mind…that part listens more closely, and thinks it discerns a common thread. Where that thread comes from and where it goes is still unclear, but Sephiroth doesn’t have many other choices to follow. And if nothing else, Vincent is actually responding to him, however incoherently. Vincent is listening to him and then responding.

So he asks: “But she told you something. She told you, not him—not your father. What did she tell you?”

Vincent stares at him. Unblinking, unmoving, even when Sephiroth eventually loses patience and pushes himself up into a sitting position. He starts to snap that Vincent might as well dive back into his corner, but then he realizes he can still hear the man’s heartbeat.

And remembers Vincent pointing to that stack of papers when he’d first woken. He had managed to read those before he’d fallen asleep, but—the numbers his dream of his mother had highlighted. They’re coming to mind now that he’s focused and he knows he’s seen them before, and not in that logicless way where everything in a dream seems almost recognizable.

Sephiroth crawls over to the papers and picks them up. He means to take them back to the sleeping pad to read through, but right on the top page is a number that catches his eye: same as his dream. And then another several lines down. So he pulls himself into a seated position right there, leafing through the sheets and seeing now the pattern in the test results that he’d missed before.

The same pattern his mother had found, he knows in his gut. Not about predicting Chaos’ appearances in the area, but a different one, showing that length of appearance at the sites is linked to elevated levels of a recurring, unidentified mineral. A specific mineral, and that’s the key, because the miners had previously been able to identify the general ore type associated with Chaos but all ores are made up of multiple components. Most of the components in this area have already been categorized, so finding the unknown one is usually a simple process of elimination, but because of the ore’s draining effects on other minerals, they’d never been able to isolate the active unknown.

What Sephiroth is looking at doesn’t do that either. Valentine wasn’t ordering any tests that the engineers weren’t already doing and these reports are routine core sample analyses. They list out all known components as well as components that can’t be identified with complete confidence—which means the latter are lumped together. But the raw data in the appendices do show a pattern, and that pattern, imprecise though it is, is enough to deduce the presence of a unique mineral. To track it without extracting it, and if it could be tracked, then at minimum his mother knew where to find more of it, and perhaps even how to trace it back to the mother lode.

“She found something. She found some…trace of Chaos, and she took it with her to work on,” Sephiroth says, reaching for his mother’s other notes. He finds the ones he wants without looking up from what he’s reading and pulls them over, then looks to them to find the relevant entry. “She thought it’d contributed to your father’s injuries—thought if she could research it, he’d recover faster. She took a sample with her—did Hojo get hold of it?”

No answer.

Sephiroth looks up, unable to hide his irritated snarl but fully expecting to find an empty space on the other side of the bars. So when an intent stare instead meets his eyes, he jerks back in surprise.

“No,” Vincent says, which cuts through Sephiroth’s returning frustration by directly answering the question. He doesn’t show any triumph at the double shock he’s delivered, or honestly, any emotion at all, and yet Sephiroth has the unmistakable impression that the other man is looking at him differently. “He didn’t. She kept it away from him, but it wasn’t much—it wasn’t enough. She didn’t have any left after helping me so we had to come back to my father. I told her—I told her it was probably going to kill her, going that far, but she wouldn’t change her mind.”

Then that makes—Sephiroth riffles through his mother’s notes again, recalling exactly the passage that he thinks this fully contextualizes but not finding the corresponding sheet. He looks furiously around himself, knowing that he read it but not seeing the page, and for an irrational moment he almost thinks if Vincent had taken that while he’d been absorbed in the other material, if he’s having his mother taken from him all over again—

But he finds the sheet, one corner sticking out from under his shin. Because he’d forgotten that he’d climbed over it to reach the other pile. Sephiroth lifts his leg and pulls the paper free, gently smoothing at one crinkled edge in a fit of remorse at his thoughtlessness, and Vincent says: “She told me that there was more in the mines. She’d only taken a little bit of it, and now that she knew how to tell it from the rest, she just needed to get more, if she had that she might be able to change things. But she—didn’t tell me the rest and I can’t read that, Chaos can’t read that—the mines don’t stay the same and they don’t know how to get to that place anymore. Without her telling, I can’t find it.”

“Where this…stuff is. Which she used on you,” Sephiroth says, looking up from his mother’s notes. “She used…on Chaos.”

He lets the last word rise as a question, but with how Vincent abruptly shudders and slams his head against the bars again, Sephiroth suspects it may need to lie as a statement. At least until their next—it suddenly occurs to Sephiroth to check the time, because he’s completely lost track of how long he’s been reading.

“Yes,” Vincent rasps. His head is still pressed against the bars, tilted so that he’s facing the floor with his hanging hair completely obscuring his face. Sephiroth hesitates, noting the smeared blood seeping into his hair, but when Vincent snorts he finally goes for the watch. “Father said he’d be late.”

“And you trust the man?” Sephiroth mutters, noting the time.

“No,” Vincent says. He twists a little as Sephiroth looks up at him, but not as if he’s in the grip of another spasm. At least, not of the physical kind; from the way his voice changes, Sephiroth isn’t certain what might be going on in the man’s head. “But I can’t—I can’t read that. I never could. She had to tell me, and then Father’s said he can’t—he knows where they looked but not which ones are the—the—”

“She never gave him the distribution analysis. He can’t tell you where the concentrations are high or low,” Sephiroth says, and then another connection flashes through his mind. “You could deduce it from the effects on you if you moved around but then you and Chaos would change, and the new you might not care about being trapped down here.”

Vincent shakes his head a little and Sephiroth frowns, fighting back a surge of exasperation—what else does he have to guess at—but then the other man puts his hand through the bars to point, blindly but accurately, at the key reports again. “I think I’d care, but not the same…there’s a kind of destruction even Chaos doesn’t want,” Vincent mutters, which seems more of an agreement than not, albeit still in cryptic terms. “But that is the problem, I can’t always tell…he’s my father, I know that but I still can’t tell…when they’re speaking, I can’t always tell the difference. When she spoke I couldn’t and I almost ki—I can’t make it clear up on my own. Father has to help me with that.”

Sephiroth can’t help his own snort, but he refrains from pointing out that Valentine’s idea of help also has mired Vincent here. Perhaps Valentine genuinely thinks that that’s all he can do, try and freeze Vincent’s condition while he searches and searches for an alternative, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the man’s fault that he doesn’t have the right talent for it. What Sephiroth’s mother had found is something that had eluded all the other experts in the field for decades, something so rare and astounding that she ended up paying for it with her life.

“At least Hojo never knew,” Sephiroth says, looking back at his mother’s papers. He spies another crease and strokes along it, then gets up onto one knee so he can tidy the other pages and move them to where he won’t trample them again. “I can imagine what he would have done with it—we wouldn’t even be talking, all you’d have to talk to is that damned alien screaming from—”

“You’re clear.” Vincent is still leaning against the bars, his hand still lying just inside the cell. “Clear. You’re the clearest. She’s not and she’s not—I keep losing them. You’re still clear, and you don’t go away when they do…Father can make it clear for a little bit at a time but then I can’t hear…except for you. I can always hear you.”

His voice still has that unnatural weight to it, but it’s otherwise toneless. Sephiroth doesn’t mistake it for a pledge of loyalty or anything but a statement of how Vincent sees the world, and they both still have the choice to act or not act on it. Though certain approaches do immediately come to mind, plain logic dictating that if Sephiroth’s primary goal is to escape, then he should seize whatever advantages present themselves. And Vincent is increasingly obvious about how he’s been starving for some sort of tiebreaker between him and his father, even if he might still balk at directly harming the man.

But if he develops an alliance with Vincent, he can’t guarantee that it won’t break as soon as they’re out of the mines. He’s not in any condition to unilaterally ensure the man doesn’t turn on him, and if anything, he’ll likely need Vincent’s assistance for more than the way out, since he cannot imagine going back to Shinra at this point. So if he’s to offer something worth Vincent’s while…but even if Vincent actually is behaving human enough to make that a plausible avenue, the question of what to offer still seems complicated. Unlike with Hojo, Vincent doesn’t seem to want revenge on his father. And even if he did, this is no impersonal team-up against a common enemy. Sephiroth’s past collaborations involved delicate political calculations but he’d never had to be more than superficially familiar with others’ personal lives to execute them, never felt more than some shade of resentment about them.

But he does feel more than that now about Vincent, he realizes. And it’s not personal just because of Valentine. Vincent knows things about his mother he wants to know, but also, knows things about Sephiroth now that no one else does, simply because he’s seen Sephiroth in a situation that Sephiroth will fight tooth and nail after this to ensure never happens again. But this has happened to Sephiroth, and he can’t pretend otherwise, and for Vincent to know…for one other person to know who he is, to understand that without immediately using it against him, if it’s only one person and a rambling madman…that feels different. And it also isn’t something Sephiroth has ever had the luxury of before, but it is something he’s seen crop up over and over again in his mother’s writing, how badly she wants at least one person to know what she knows, to understand what she’s found.

She wasn’t alone in that either—he feels the same as her, now that he’s learned what he was missing through her writing, and he can’t wash that out of his mind. He can’t simply think of Vincent as a mere failed test subject, or as a temporary strategic advantage. And while he thinks he still could fight Vincent if he had to, it wouldn’t be the kind of fights he’s had before.

So truthfully, he’s not the same man who walked in with Valentine, he thinks sourly. And then he sets his handful of papers aside and crawls up to the bars till his knee bumps into Vincent’s hand, because no matter who he is now, he still wants to get out of this cage. And for that he needs Vincent. “Clear how? I thought you said she can—that alien can still try and come into me.”

“But you’re screaming in there with her. When you’re fighting her, I can still hear you,” Vincent says. His head shifts as Sephiroth comes up and it’s probably just enough to get his hair out of the way as Sephiroth reaches out and taps the back of his hand. His left hand, with the plates that shiver out a metallic sound even from that. “With her I couldn’t be sure if she was still there or not, but I can tell with you.”

Sephiroth had had a line of conversation planned, but at that he ditches it and stares at the tangled top of Vincent’s head. “Her—which her? My mot—”

“You hear both of them?” Vincent’s head suddenly comes up and then his stare is boring into Sephiroth again. It’s infuriating how effective that tactic remains. “You were sleeping, but it wasn’t her, Chaos and I knew—”

“Jenova. This time you mean Jenova. My mother’s dead, remember?” Sephiroth says. And then impatiently knocks the bar with his hand when Vincent doesn’t immediately react. “I need you to at least try to keep things straight enough to answer me, if you or Chaos or whatever else is in there actually wants out of here. Understand?”

Vincent nods.

Sephiroth blinks in surprise. Then exhales to release the rest of his frustration, so he can try and keep calm enough to not drive off the other man. “No, she wasn’t assaulting me while I slept, thankfully. But earlier you said…my mother was dying from the Jenova cells that’d colonized her, and she knew she was losing herself. And you knew that too, or did she tell you that? Could you sense it independently?”

“I could hear them both—but it was harder and harder to tell.” Vincent’s forehead creases and his breathing briefly becomes labored. Then he jerks his hand out of the cell, only to smash that forearm up against the bars so he can then jam his head against it. He has drying streaks of blood in his hair from earlier and fresh drops soak in over them as he grimaces. “I woke up with Chaos in me, and Jenova in her. I was always hearing the two of them, always together even though they weren’t the same but it was already hard to tell the difference and it only got worse—but it’s clear with you. I never have that problem, you and her. I don’t know why but you don’t blur into her.”

There is nothing Sephiroth will ever thank Hojo for, he decided that a long time ago, and it would take far more than an invasive extraterrestrial to change his mind on that. But he does recognize, bitterly, that the man had made him unique “If it ever starts to blur for you, then tell me. I’ll make it stop—I am not going to give into her, and if she can kill me, then she can kill me, but she’s never going to—to absorb me.”

Vincent moves so that one eye can peer through the knotted mass of hair at Sephiroth. “If you leave through the wrong way, you might change and that could go away. You won’t be able to help that—Lucrecia could find it but even she couldn’t control it, what she found.”

“Then I’m going to map a way that won’t do that,” Sephiroth snaps. “Just help me tell when she’s here so I can fight her off.”

For another moment Vincent stares at him. Then, with sudden, eerily silent fluidity, Vincent retreats a yard and squats there. Head up, arms down at his sides, stare leveled at Sephiroth. He’s accomplished his goal for this session—he does have goals of his own, and is trying to advance them, Sephiroth now sees.

So the man should go back to his corner now, as he’s done before. But he lingers, and after a few seconds Sephiroth sighs. “It would also help y—”

“Everyone changes. Even if they don’t notice—even if I’m not sure, I think that happens,” Vincent says. “It’s happened with everyone who comes in here, whatever she found that does that, it affects everyone. Even you.”

“I’m not going to—” Sephiroth catches himself and reels his temper back “—if I’m so clear, then you can tell how I am, can’t you? That’s the point. You can tell if I change more.”

A flicker of amusement goes across Vincent’s face, and Sephiroth has another one of those moments where he can imagine the man in a suit, looking on with bored knowledge from a conference room corner. “You were clearest when I had your blood in my mouth,” Vincent says. “That, you couldn’t fake. Without that…I have to try to see. But you’re trying hard enough.”

Sephiroth stiffens but resists the urge to jump back against the far wall of the cell where he can’t be reached. It’s posturing, obviously. Vincent’s not only capable of planning, under that fragmented mind, but also still capable of entertaining himself at Sephiroth’s expense.

“You’re trying,” Vincent says again, now without the half-smile. “You’re trying, but everyone I’ve seen changes. Everyone.”

The lights flicker, and in spite of himself Sephiroth blinks reflexively to clear his sight. Of course Vincent vanishes back to his corner during that split second, but he leaves a splinter of a suggestion that continues to needle through Sephiroth’s mind, even as Sephiroth snorts in exasperation and resumes reorganizing the papers. There’s the idea that Vincent finds him most believable when the man feels certain how to read him—which admittedly Sephiroth has some sympathy for, with a mind-controlling alien in the mix—and so Sephiroth notes to himself that blood isn’t only a matter of sustenance for Vincent.

But there’s something else as well, and it’s not until Sephiroth has settled back on his pad and is halfway through a report when it finally coalesces in his mind: everyone has changed. Vincent thinks everyone has been affected by this…by the unknown mineral, or its combination with Jenova or with Chaos, the exact source isn’t quite clear. But the scope is, and the man had also admitted to not trusting his father. Who has been in these tunnels for years tending to Vincent, and who even before that, had been so badly injured in one that he’d been hospitalized. Yet he’s up and walking now, and has been hiding Vincent for Sephiroth’s entire lifetime. Even if he has collaborators, that’s no mean feat…for a mere human.

And Vincent had dropped those other hints: Sephiroth’s mother had feared for Valentine’s life enough to try and leverage her time in Hojo’s lab to analyze the Chaos mineral as a possible cure, and then she’d done something to Vincent with it that hadn’t worked out. But had she done anything to Valentine once they’d arrived here, when she could have gotten more of it? And if she hadn’t been able to and Valentine had already had something wrong with him, what could that have allowed to go unchecked?

Sephiroth puts down the report, thinks, and then picks it back up again, reading feverishly.

Chapter 18: Present

In the warehouse, they’re not reviewing all the potential reports as they go because that would take too long. They’re pulling for multiple years in two time spans, one right before the Sephiroth mission and one starting a few years before Valentine’s accident and running to a couple years afterward per Eleanor’s ghost story. That’s phase one, which takes until an hour and a half after lunch to assemble a small pyramid of boxes.

Phase two is actually opening up the boxes and going through them. Everything is paper, so even though each box comes with a contents log, that log is a piece of paper slipped into a plastic sleeve taped to the front of the box. For the later period it’s at least printed, but for the earlier period, some of the logs are actually handwritten and it’s just a good thing that Zack has gotten very used to Genesis’ adoration of cursive—if you don’t have to turn it upside-down at least once, you’re doing it wrong—and Angeal’s chicken-scratch.

This part is also all on Zack, Cloud, and Cissnei, since they don’t want to give the others details that might be used to work out what they think might be going on, or to tip off more people to what happened in the hangar. So it’s a lot of work, and they’re doing it by themselves in a cleared-out breakroom in the corner of the warehouse. Sure, the breakroom comes with decent chairs, lighting, a coffee machine and attached toilets so they don’t have to hike back through the shelves, but it’s still a lot of work.

That said, Zack doesn’t have to take a break as soon as he does, and he feels a little guilty when just as he’s stepping out into the hall, Cloud curses and Cissnei says she’ll get him a tissue for that papercut. SOLDIER healing is great but those things still sting like hell.

But he did promise Angeal regular updates, and he figures some are due. He also…he also doesn’t want to send these in front of anyone else, including Cloud, and it’s not a trust issue so much as…he still can’t help flinching away whenever he tries to think about a couple things. He knows he has to, at least enough to describe them for Angeal, but he doesn’t have to do that in front of the others.

This part of the warehouse has a couple offices next to the breakroom and they’re currently empty, but one has a half-drunk cup of coffee on the desk inside and the other is directly across from it, and the doors here have big windows in them. Zack does have the right to commandeer the office from its owner, but he doesn’t feel like doing that and so he walks out into the warehouse proper and then pokes around till he finds a relatively shielded spot between two pallets of crates. One pallet’s crates aren’t all the same size, which makes for a handy seat.

And Zack ends up needing that since he types out and rewrites his first message a good three times before finally sending it, and that one is just updating that they’re currently at the warehouse. He takes a deep breath and tells himself to just report what happened and stop angsting over it, because if it’s crazy, then Angeal will see that and won’t hold it against him, and if it’s not crazy…

If it’s not crazy, then holding it back is the wrong thing to do. He knows that.

So he sends a follow-up. He puts it all in there, even the moment when he somehow pulled this Lucrecia’s name out of thin air—though he does add in that he’s low on sleep and Cloud still has a lot of research he’s glanced at that they haven’t gone through in detail. And then he takes another deep breath, looking at his phone.

There’s no reply, but he wasn’t expecting any. If Angeal’s made it to Wutai by now, then the day is just starting and he’s probably in the middle of—“Well, a warzone, c’mon, Zack,” Zack says under his breath. “Don’t be a selfish…”

He hears something. And it says something about where his nerves are at that his first reaction is to reach for his sword, and his second is to jerk off the crate into a defensive crouch when his hand meets thin air. He’s not wearing his sword—of course he’s not wearing it, he’s been sitting at a table flipping paper for the last hour and their sword harnesses aren’t really designed for comfort in that position. So it’s back in the conference room, leaning against the wall.

And that’s not a woman’s voice he’s hearing: it’s Cloud. Zack exhales in mingled relief and irritation at himself, then drags one hand over his face as he hears his friend walk on past the start of the aisle he’s in, still talking to someone on the phone.

“…yeah. Yeah,” Cloud is saying while Zack tries to pull himself together enough to clear his throat and stop being a creepy eavesdropper. “No. No—I’m fine. I’m not—it’s not that weird. Not any weirder than home. And Zack’s here.”

Zack rubs his hand over his face again, then wipes it off on his knee as he pushes off the ground. Part of him notes that it doesn’t sound like a work call, not only because Cloud is actually giving his personal opinion about the situation but also because of the way the man sounds, clearly emoting. Annoyed emoting, but emoting.

Contrary to popular belief, Cloud has friends besides his job and Zack. He doesn’t like to bring them up to people who work at Shinra because they don’t work at Shinra—they’re mostly back in Nibelheim—and as much as Zack likes his job, he totally understands that. SOLDIER takes care of its own but most people can’t get into SOLDIER, and just having an association with a SOLDIER isn’t always good enough, witness Ifalna and Aerith. So it’s unusual for Cloud to actually be on a call with one of his friends at all, let alone during regular work hours, and Zack doesn’t want to embarrass the man so he rethinks his initial idea of just walking out and looks around for a way to make a discreet warning noise so Cloud thinks he’s farther off.

“I told you already,” Cloud says sharply. Then he’s quiet and Zack spots a handy pebble a couple yards away on the ground. “Yeah…well…if you do that, then I’m not coming back at all.”

Zack is halfway to the pebble. And he truly isn’t trying to listen in on Cloud’s call, but SOLDIER supersenses, you can’t really turn them off. Plus there’s just something about Cloud’s tone that Zack isn’t sure he’s ever heard before that makes him pause and lift his head. It sounds like the man is frustrated enough to actually be threatening someone, and Cloud…doesn’t do threats. He’s come a long way from being one of the lowest-scoring recruits ever to make it into SOLDIER, but he still doesn’t rely on muscle to get around, and that’s one reason why Zack likes him so much.

“…because I told you,” Cloud says. He sounds calmer now, voice lower and with less edges, but no less firm. “I’m not going till I’m done. And I don’t know why you think that sounds weird coming from me. You’ve seen me.”

Actually, it’s not just the anger, and the idea of non-confrontational devotee Cloud making a threat. It’s how this sounds as if it’s the kind of argument you have with your partner who wants you to not take that one mission. And then Zack thinks about those moments of furtive messaging and the couple times Cloud has seemed strained about more than just the weird, gory mystery here, and decides that he doesn’t need to alert Cloud to his presence at all. He can just sneak around this end of the shelves and make his way back to the breakroom without running into the other man.

When he gets back into the room, Cissnei is slumped back in her seat, one big stack and one little stack of folders in front of her and her current box. She’s staring at them as if imagining how to set them on fire, so Zack coughs first and then asks, “Find anything?”

She doesn’t look up but she does push herself forward, groaning a little as some muscle tweaks somewhere. “No, not really. Everything looks really normal.”

“Yeah, I think we were finding the same,” Zack says as he goes back to his spot. He doesn’t mention Cloud since she doesn’t seem to be about to, and just reaches for the sideways folder he stuck in his box to mark where he’d left off. “I mean, I am finding reports Valentine initialed as part of the review panel, but it’s all just regular sampling. It doesn’t even look like he was doing his own testing.”

“…wait,” Cissnei says. When he looks over, she’s frowning at her box, but then she twists to look at him. “Wait. You’re right. Where are his tests?”

“What?” Zack says. Then he glances at the five boxes they still have waiting for them. “Okay, granted, we’re not even through the first year—”

“Yeah, but what the hell was he doing if he wasn’t generating tests left and right?” Cissnei says. She looks at the boxes too, but much more viciously than Zack, as if they’ve already sliced up her hands to ribbons. “He’s running his own R&D project. He’s got to ask the engineers to test his samples for him but he should be sending in his own reqs for those, not just looking at the routine ones they do anyway. That’s the whole point, right, all the ghosts are centered on the shafts they’re not actively mining. So where are those?”

She’s right. Zack quickly goes back through his box, now looking for that pattern, and he confirms that this one has nothing but samples from active mines. Then he and Cissnei go out and find a control box from a year they weren’t interested in, and they can see just from the front label that it has samples from active mines and samples from potential sites.

At that point Cloud joins them. They brief him and quickly redo their search parameters and go through the remaining boxes in half as much time as it’d taken them to go through the first set, with the same results of nada. Then they ask the warehouse manager, who calls the archive manager just to be sure. Thanks to earlier, the archive manager isn’t that surprised to hear that they want to know where the contents of Valentine’s office got to, but he does seem a little perturbed that any specially-requested tests by Valentine aren’t boxed with the other ore samples. Keeping them separate apparently isn’t standard protocol, though he can’t guarantee what they were doing before him.

Anyway, he points them towards another part of the warehouse, but caveats that when they clear out a former employee’s office, a lot of times that just ends up in the trash. “Said it was ‘up to the manager’ what to keep and not to keep, not the archive people,” Cloud says doubtfully.

Cissnei grimaces. “That’d mean R&D.”

Which means that if it’s not here, they’re out of luck getting hold of anything unless their respective bosses want to elevate it. Since they’d found Heidegger’s body, Zack has been thinking about that—it’s part of why he put in the latest update to Angeal—but he’s not recommending it yet since, coldblooded as it sounds, Heidegger and the pilot weren’t civilians and Heidegger had been on the run. Cissnei doesn’t seem to be leaning that way yet either, or else there’d be more Turks coming in, but Zack wonders if he should start poking her to find out about why she feels that way.

“Maybe,” Cloud says, which makes both Cissnei and Zack look at him. He blinks a couple times as if the cliffhanger tone had been completely unintentional, but then he reaches for his phone. Doesn’t actually pull it out before he goes on, but his hand stays on his pocket for a couple seconds. “I kind of asked earlier, and they don’t remember anybody wanting Valentine’s old files. They don’t have any records of stuff getting shipped back to Midgar from here, anyway.”

Zack grins and claps Cloud on the back. “Always going down the side and finding the pocket, Spike. Good job.”

Cloud grunts and straightens himself up, but he does look pleased for the second before he blanks out his face for Cissnei. “Doesn’t rule out someone coming out and taking things back later, and nobody here now would’ve been around for that,” he adds.

Cissnei still looks more optimistic about their new wall of boxes. “Well, we’ll check that one when we have to,” she says. “Want to get me that ladder, or do you two want to start up top?”

* * *

Several hours later, Zack’s hands are free of papercuts in principle, but as a practical matter they feel like several layers of skin have been taken off because healing just works on the living cells. Calluses are dead cells and they’ve been steadily whittled down by all the damn folders, and despite all of that they have less than a standard file box’s worth of materials for Valentine.

“I guess he could be the one scientist ever who managed to keep his space neat and tidy and just took home a couple desk toys at the end of his gig,” Zack mutters.

They’re back in the conference room. Cissnei looks at him and starts to say something, but then just heaves a disappointed sigh instead. Not only have they not found that much, but it’s all HR-related things and the closest they have to any work product is a single sheet of paper listing out book titles in the man’s personal library. Of course Cloud jumped on that and put in some new queries, but just from the titles—all mythology and folklore, and mostly about other regions—Zack doesn’t think it’s going to add anything.

Though they did at least confirm that Cissnei’s Vincent Valentine and this Dr. Grimoire Valentine are father and son: Vincent is listed in some of Grimoire’s paperwork as next of kin and beneficiary. But if Vincent’s last post was up in Nibelheim almost twenty years before the Sephiroth mission, Zack still can’t really see how that helps to shed light on what was and is still going on in Corel.

All right, he’s tired, and the fact that they technically still have forty minutes till the official dinner hour isn’t helping. He shouldn’t be as ridiculously hungry as he is given what they’ve been doing, but tell that to his blood sugar levels.

“Something else is going on here,” Cissnei says. She has her arms folded across her chest and she tightens those up as she stares at the paltry haul of files in front of them. “All this stuff about not being around for it…”

“Well, they weren’t,” Zack points out, and then puts up a hand against the irritated look she gives him. “Listen, I’m not trying to say you’re wrong, but I don’t think we’re being lied to by any of the locals and if your next idea is to start dragging them into interrogation rooms, that’s really not going to help keep a lid on Hei—”

“Maybe you shouldn’t just assume what my next idea is going to be, Fair,” Cissnei says icily, though from how she’d suppressed a twitch at his words, she had at least been considering it. “And I remember what’s on the line here, it’s my job to look out for the entire company including SOLDIER, even when you all—”

“Hey, Zack?” Cloud asks. He’d been silently putting the irrelevant files back into boxes, conscientiously checking them against the catalog slips, but he’s stopped that and is frowning at the catalog in his hand. “What was her name? Valentine’s wife?”

“Benzaiten,” Cissnei sighs.

“Lucrecia,” Zack says.

Cloud redirects his frown to them, and Zack belatedly realizes he hadn’t completely caught Cloud up on his earlier chat with Cissnei. Or had even digested what Cissnei told him and that’s all it is, not a deliberate slip that hints at some hidden agenda when he honestly has no idea what that would be, though Cissnei still seems a little suspicious as she unpacks the Lucrecia-Valentine connection for Cloud. “Dr. Valentine’s actual wife died way before he came to Corel, before I think he even accepted a permanent position with Shinra. Her name just came up in Vincent’s background check because she was Wutaian,” she ends with. “So Lucrecia’s who you mean, right?”

“That’s the name here,” Cloud says after a brief pause.

He shows them the catalog entry, marking out a file assigned to Lucrecia Crescent as part of Valentine’s work files. And when they go back into the box, miraculously, the file is actually there.

Less miraculously, it only seems to contain topographical maps and not any notes or anything that would give them an idea of why these particular maps are in it. Cissnei briefly mumbles something about metadata, but they both know these printouts are too old to have a hope of finding the underlying electronic file. And even Zack can tell that the printouts don’t focus on the areas that they’ve so far been focusing on in—some of the sites are included, but based just on that they’d have to consider the entire mountain range with how much the maps cover.

“Well, she was just some lab-hopping assistant,” Cissnei says, flopping back into her chair again. “Probably was a Hojo spy if there’s any connection at all.”

Zack opens his mouth to reply to that, but then Cloud catches his eye. The other man took the maps back from Cissnei and Zack had assumed that was to refile them, but instead Cloud has laid them out on the table and is now comparing them to something on his phone. “Spike? Don’t suppose you’ve got another mind-bending insight for us?”

“…I don’t know,” Cloud mutters, but he’s bending over and tracing something with his finger on one map now. “But these aren’t…these aren’t the standard maps. They’re not even for that time frame—I pulled all those as prep and these aren’t the ones I pulled.”

“Oh, right, I remember,” Zack says, while Cissnei’s head comes up too. “Anything really weird?”

Cloud doesn’t immediately answer, but Zack can tell that the man’s got his working face on so Zack doesn’t take offense. He just gives Cloud a little room to work and gestures to Cissnei to do the same; she purses her lips a couple times but then just gets up and tops off her coffee.

Then she comes back and she and Zack sit there for a few more minutes until Cloud finally moves back from the maps. He starts to sit down but then blinks hard as he notices he’s being watched. Then he recovers and pulls himself up to the table to point at a spot on one of the maps.

“So this is where we’re supposed to tour tomorrow, and this over here—” Cloud drags his finger over a couple inches “—is where Eleanor said her story happened, where the Valentine ghost stories were happening.”

Zack rolls over for a closer look, then pauses as Cissnei gets up and walks around both him and Cloud to Cloud’s other side to lean in from there. He can see a thin line connecting the two places. It’s not a straight line and has some unnecessary bulges, but it’s definitely there. It’s also surrounded by a broader, irregular shaded strip that’s capped by a teardrop at one of the spots and then balloons out into a botched pancake around the other.

“What does this color mean? Is this following an ore vein?” Cissnei asks, pointing to the shaded part.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t have a legend.” Cloud moves another sheet so that they can see the map has grid markings running around the edges. Each mark has a little number by it and those follow standard GPS coordinate notation, but other than that, there isn’t anything to explain the map. “But if this—” Cloud taps the thin line “—is a tunnel, then it’s not on the standard maps.”

“Well, are the other lines tunnels?” Cissnei asks.

For an answer, Cloud puts his phone down on the table. He’s got one of his maps up on the screen and he zooms out to show them that the GPS coordinates match up, then zooms in on a section that has a pretty distinctive pattern of intersecting tunnels. There’s an identical pattern at the same spot on this Lucrecia’s map, which then helps them work out what else corresponds to what.

So a thin black line does appear to mean a tunnel. But the shading on the map doesn’t match up to anything in any map Cloud can pull up: elevation, water levels, known ore distribution, seismic activities, gas pockets. They go through everything Cloud has, which is everything Cissnei can think to name, and nothing remotely looks like this map.

“Okay, well, the tunnel should be easy enough to check,” Zack finally says, since he can sense them all getting frustrated. “And if that’s there tomorrow, then we can sit down and think how to go from there.”

Cissnei exhales in irritation, but she’s looking at the map and not at either Zack or Cloud. After a moment, she nods. “I’ll be coming on the tour.”

Zack had had a feeling it was going to go that way and just tells her they’ll let Barret and Dyne know because of needing protective gear for her too. That earns him another nod, but when he suggests they scan the maps and then hand back the boxes so they can go get dinner, she tells him he can take the boxes but she wants a little longer with this file.

She does let Cloud snap photos of the maps with his phone, but then takes the maps back, so clearly she means staring at the originals. “I don’t know what she’s going to get out of it, even with whatever unauthorized detectors the Turks get to play with,” Zack says to Cloud as they carry the boxes out to a waiting pallet; the warehouse manager said the team could grab them from there. “It’s paper. It’s not like the metadata is going to magically surface if she stares at it hard enough.”

“Yeah,” Cloud says, but he sounds distracted. And his phone is buzzing quietly in his pocket, though he goes to silence it as soon as he realizes Zack’s noticed. “Sorry. I canceled on somebody because we flew out and they’re—it’s not work.”

“It’s fine, you’re allowed to have a private life,” Zack says, smiling, as he thinks about that overheard call from earlier. “And you know, it’s usually better if they’re mad that they missed out on you than if they didn’t care.”

Cloud smiles back at Zack but it’s a little strained. He’s probably worried that Zack’s going to start prying into who it is, and normally that would be Zack’s go-to, but today…today Zack thinks that that’s just going to be more stress, having to think about what might be going on back in Midgar and with who, and he doesn’t feel like doing that. To Cloud or to…

“You think it’s weird?” Cloud asks quietly. When Zack blinks at him, he winces as if he did something wrong, then starts to turn.

“What? Nah, Spike, listen, just because I have a sorry love life doesn’t mean—”

Cloud’s face goes blank. Stressed out, Zack immediately thinks, because Cloud does tend to downplay his feelings but he doesn’t usually cut them out that suddenly, not since he realized he got to be an actual human and not just a recruit around Zack. But then Cloud shakes his head. “No, I was…I was talking about the whole Lucrecia thing. Her being in that photo in his office, and then we find these maps she made with his things. She didn’t come up when I first ran searches on him.”

“Well, from what Cissnei said, she wasn’t working for him for that long,” Zack says.

“Yeah, that’s what’s been coming back since I redid the queries.” Cloud shrugs one shoulder, being modest about his research skills. “She’s in there, but I don’t know how you picked her name out. None of the hits are that obvious, or even about mapping anything. She’s down as doing genetics and that’s way outside of Valentine’s area.”

Zack grimaces, then rubs one hand against the back of his neck. He didn’t want to think about this. “Yeah, I know, I don’t…know. I guess it’s just…kind of a different name. But I wasn’t thinking they were close enough to be photo friends either.”

Which seems to be enough for Cloud, who doesn’t poke more about where exactly that name came from, or start talking about whether it’d been in anything he sent Zack before or only in the more recent stuff, which is honestly something that Zack has been worrying about in the back of his mind. He shouldn’t be—he shouldn’t be scared of his own fucking mind, of all things. Sure, there might be something hallucinogenic in that chip of rock they found in the plane, which might lead back to a whole bunch of hallucinogenic stuff in the mines somewhere, but all that means is that they’ve been made to see and hear things that aren’t really there. It doesn’t mean they’re going crazy.

And he doesn’t want to think about that. He hadn’t had to really think about it since they were busy with organizing the warehouse team to pull boxes for them and then busy with going through files, but now that they’re wrapping up here, Zack kind of doesn’t have a choice. He owes Angeal another update before they go to dinner, and he’s going to have to say something.

Okay, Zack could just lay out the facts again and wait to see if Angeal picks up on anything, but while that was enough to get him over the hill last time, this time it makes him feel like the asshole who purposefully lags last during warm-up runs so they don’t have to go as many laps. Angeal’s in the middle of a war and he needs Zack to not just send him info but help him figure out how to look at it. That’s exactly what he asked Zack to do out here…and exactly what Zack keeps trying to get out of doing.

Maybe he needs a second opinion, even if it makes him look like a bad mission lead. But when Zack turns to Cloud, the other man’s not there anymore. Zack goes down the hallway towards the rest of the warehouse, but then stops when he spots Cloud just outside the doorway at the end, talking to the warehouse manager and gesturing towards the pallet of waiting boxes.

He turns around the other way, where Cissnei is still huddling with those files, but she’s not really an option. Even if she’s shown more sympathy than Zack would’ve predicted back in Midgar, she’s not going to hold back if she thinks Zack is having an issue. And mental issues within SOLDIER is what Angeal was afraid all these ghost stories would lead to—Zack exhales in frustration, then just stops himself from kicking out at the wall.

He flops back against the opposite one instead, rubbing at the side of his face. Then he makes himself pull out his phone, even though he still isn’t sure what he’s going to tell Angeal this time…and sees he has messages. From Aerith.

Zack nearly drops his phone unlocking it. He glances both ways, but thankfully there are no witnesses, so he looks down at the messages. Timestamp is only a few minutes ago, while he and Cloud were transferring the boxes to the pallet.

I hope I’m not bothering you, she starts. I don’t think this is urgent, but I don’t really know when is a good time for you so I decided to just send it. Please don’t bother Angeal either, he shouldn’t have to worry about anything right now.

Sounds like her, and as Zack scrolls through the first message, he can picture the way Aerith’s smile goes a little crooked with self-deprecation. It’s funny how just doing that makes him feel more relaxed, even as he’s now worrying about what might be going on with her and Ifalna.

Momma’s still having nightmares and one made her worried about you, Aerith goes on. She wanted me to tell you to be careful, and especially to be careful about who you listen to.

Zack realizes he’s smiling when he slides the phone up in his hand to get the keyboard up and catches his reflection in the screen. No worries, I’ve always got a second to check my messages. Are you two all right? Don’t need anything? he types back.

He knows better than to hope that she’s still on, but the universe has finally decided to give him a win because the dots immediately pop up under his text to show she’s typing. We’re both fine, she just isn’t sleeping very much but I’m trying to keep her calm. She hasn’t heard from Angeal since he left but he warned us about that. I’m sure he’s fine.

Yeah, he is, Zack types. Actually, he at first types that Angeal’s fine and he knows because he heard from Angeal and then he remembers that timestamping Angeal like that when the man’s on the front lines is a no-no. He shakes himself, then blinks hard, twice, before he looks back down and reworks his message. Don’t worry about him. Let your mom know Angeal’s got the entire battalion looking after him, and I personally vetted every single one of them.

Aerith sends him a smiling emoji. Then there’s a lag or something, because he doesn’t see the blinking dots but her second message comes through several seconds later, right as he thinks she must have meant the emoji as a sign-off.

Momma worries about Angeal all the time, but they had a long talk before he left and I think that helped. She’s just worried now about whether he’ll have the time to do what she told him would help, but now she’s worried about you and I think it’s different. She hasn’t said much but it doesn’t seem to be what she was worried over Angeal for, Aerith types. The dots show up again, but it’s another twenty or so seconds before more comes through. I’ll see if I can get more out of her, but for now, please be careful.

Of course. And tell her thanks for worrying, but really not worth the trouble, Zack types back.

“Hot date?” comes Cissnei’s voice.

Zack looks up while sliding the app off the screen and twisting his phone to keep that not visible as he drops it back into his pocket. Cissnei’s standing halfway out of the breakroom door, a speculative look on her face that turns into outright amusement as she takes in his expression. So he doesn’t bother to act like his face is lying and just leans into it. “Yeah, well, got to have something to look forward to once we get back to Midgar. You done?”

“Yeah, you can come scan them, or have Cloud do it.” Cissnei comes all the way out of the room. She doesn’t have the maps in her hand so Zack goes to the doorway and looks, and yep, they’re still on the table. “Or if you’re both busy with your dates, I can just do it.”

“Cloud’s busy getting the other boxes back up on the shelves,” Zack says. “I’ll do it.”

“No need to get snappy again, it’s not like we don’t already know what you get up to on Saturday nights,” Cissnei says. She steps out of Zack’s way, then cocks her head. “Which is a joke, just like the other one. You’re so protective of the guy, you know Reno’s betting you two are going to get caught on the locker-room cameras.”

Zack grabs the maps off the table, then turns back to her. He hadn’t been trying to sound annoyed before, but now he has to put an effort into that. “You know, bringing up Reno tends to kill the trust vibe anyway, and then you’ve gotta throw in spying on us in our most vulnerable moments.”

He thinks he hits a reasonably light yet scolding tone, but Cissnei’s expression closes down. She takes a half-step back, her arms going up around herself, and then, shockingly, she sighs. “Sorry.”

That’s it, no attempt to justify or make an excuse, which is even more…but this isn’t crazy either, and it’s also the kind of thing Zack shouldn’t side-eye, since he knows he’s not getting it again this mission. He nods slowly at her and she nods back. Then leans against the side of the door as he comes out of the breakroom, looking past him down to the end of the hall.

“Seriously,” she says, tone business-like again. “If you two have personal stuff to get out of the way, then get it out of the way. I can find my own dinner if that helps. I just want to be able to sit down and get through a plan for tomorrow and then turn in.”

She sounds a little snappy herself, Zack thinks, but he does recognize she’s trying to work through it. “I’m done, and Cloud doesn’t need me to tell him when he’s on the clock,” he says. “Let’s just go eat so we can all have a night to sleep on things.”

She agrees, and then they go to do that. He’ll figure out how to deal with Angeal later, Zack thinks—first he has to deal with the people in front of him.

* * *

Barret and Dyne don’t immediately come off as panicking about the change in plans, but they do respond to Cloud saying they want to talk it over before anyone goes in, which seems fair. By the time Zack and Cloud and Cissnei get back to the main office, it’s too late for a meeting or even a call—Dyne is running the night shift tonight—so they make plans for a meeting in the morning.

Dinner is in the cafeteria, and is pretty bad since they basically get the last servings before it closes for the day. The hot sauce bottle runs dry between Cissnei and Zack, and even Cloud, who Zack has seen eat expired MREs on the basis that they weren’t actually spoiled and it was “wasting resources” otherwise, keeps getting up and going to get more coffee to get his meal down.

“Might as well just bring over the whole pot,” Zack calls after Cloud as the man goes off again. “Or the machine if you can unplug it. Nobody’s watching.”

Cloud raises his hand to acknowledge he heard, while Cissnei shakes her head in mock-disapproval. She seems in a surprisingly good mood, considering they’ve got at least twice as many questions as when they first got here and yet basically have the same game plan of checking out the cave. “No new dead bodies, which means nothing crawled out of Heidegger’s corpse,” she explains when called on it. “I don’t know about you, but that’s not a bad day at work for me.”

“Yeah, I see that. I guess I’m…” Zack starts, and then changes his mind about saying something on Turks and dead bodies. If she’s being sarcastic, he doesn’t feel like getting into a battle over it, and if she’s not, he…still doesn’t feel like puncturing her bubble. Someone around here should be in a good mood, he thinks.

Then he digs into his food again, knowing his expression is going sour. Cissnei still notices. “No newsflashes either, so they really are keeping their mouths shut,” she says, looking at him. “Thought you’d at least be happy you don’t have to step in and save somebody from me.”

“Oh, I am, and under that suit I think you’re fine with that too. You don’t all have to be like Reno and pick fights with SOLDIER,” Zack says, which, yeah, is a little teasing. But she actually seems to relax under it, so he shrugs. “I just…not really sure what to make of everything. You got a theory yet?”

She looks a little wary and Zack half-thinks she’s going to excuse herself to go back to her quarters. But then, after a glance to where Cloud—who is not unplugging the machine but who is taking Zack’s suggestion to just make up a whole pot this time—is standing, she leans in towards Zack.

“Heidegger was behaving a little weirdly even before he heard about the mission going out here,” she says in a low voice. She pauses, then raises her brows. “Not mad we kept it from you?”

“I…look, I can be mad all the time, or I can try and just see what people are going to do before I throw something at them,” Zack sighs. He is annoyed, but to be honest, he’s also feeling a lot more tired all of a sudden. Maybe he should’ve taken the opening to excuse himself and not have to deal with yet another mystery, but it’s gone now. “Weird how?”

“Not so weird anybody was expecting him to do a runner, let alone end up like…” Cissnei gestures towards her front like she’s cutting a line down it with one finger. “But R&D caught him poking around in the archives. Tseng actually did give Hewley a heads-up but it just seemed like Public Security versus SOLDIER, round gazillion.”

Angeal hadn’t mentioned anything about that to Zack, but he doesn’t always when it comes to R&D, and Zack can see what Cissnei means about not that weird. Heidegger should have known that he didn’t have the chops or the science to come out over R&D, and he hadn’t tried that in a while…but he had tried it before. “Anything that seems relevant now?” he asks Cissnei.

She starts to answer him, but then pauses and he sees her eyes flick to Cloud again. She keeps doing that, acting like Cloud is compromised, and Zack decides he’s had enough of it.

“You know Cloud got his clearances upgraded, right? Like he actually probably knows Angeal’s calendar better than I do, because he gets to check it instead of being busy reminding people we’ve got jobs to do?” Zack says.

Cissnei stares at him as if she genuinely hadn’t expected that from him. Why, he has no idea, since—and now he’s checking what Cloud is doing, and feeling bad about it because the man is just standing there waiting for the coffee to finish dripping, checking his phone in the meantime because he does work all the time.

“Huh. Guess Hewley and you all are okay with it, then,” Cissnei says. She shrugs as if this is supposed to mean something friendly, but there’s a distinct distance in her tone now. “You’re all so serious about fraternization…whatever, it’s not actually my job to judge.”

Zack exhales. “Okay, I think I’m just gonna—”

“Heidegger was looking into the old Nibelheim lab—way back, before Hojo even got the head of R&D gig, so that’s why nobody really thought it was related at first. But I was thinking about how this Lucrecia woman would’ve been there during that time,” Cissnei says. She puts her fork and knife down on her tray, then picks up her cup from the table and puts that on the tray too. “Maybe you should think about it too, since you were the one who spotted her photo. I’m gonna turn in but we can compare notes in the morning.”

And with that, she takes her tray to the waste area and then leaves. Cloud comes back to the table about a minute later, slowing when he sees that she’s gone but then speeding up when Zack waves him over.

“Fight?” he asks.

“No. I mean…honestly, I don’t know.” Zack gratefully holds out his cup for a refill but then finds himself just staring into the coffee. “I don’t know what the hell is going on any more, and this place just—sorry, look, I’m tired.”

Cloud nods slowly. He sets the coffee pot to the side and starts eating as if he isn’t bothered at all, and for a few minutes Zack just watches him. That’s the nice thing about Cloud, so long as it’s not a fighting situation, he generally finds a way to just ignore most kinds of weirdness.

“Did you…” Cloud asks just as Zack thinks that. Then he pauses and frowns at his food as if he thinks he’s fucked up. He shakes his head when Zack says his name, but keeps frowning. “Did you…hear anything today?”

Zack shifts back in his seat without thinking and Cloud looks up sharply, then drops his eyes again. “Hey,” Zack says, because the man looks so patently uncomfortable. “Anything wrong, Spike?”

“No.” Cloud pokes his spoon into the gluey mashed potatoes, then leaves it stuck in there as he pulls his hand back to fidget with the edge of the table. “Not…really. Nothing I can point to, I just…felt weird a couple times. Not—not as bad as when we were in the hangar right before that thing…but a little like that. But it’s probably me.”

“Look, this is all pretty weird, and that’s definitely not you,” Zack reassures him. And then somehow the words slip out as if he hasn’t been purposefully squashing them all day. “I agree, not like the hangar, but I’ve had a couple weird moments too.”

That said, if saying that out loud makes Cloud’s shoulders slump in relief like that, Zack doesn’t mind quite as much. “Was it in Valentine’s office?” Cloud asks.

It does still make Zack pause for a second. “Yeah. Just had this moment where somebody walked over my grave,” he finally says. “What about you?”

“There, yeah. Kind of. But more in the warehouse, right when I found that file of maps,” Cloud says, looking straight at Zack. “I thought I heard someone saying my name, but you and Cissnei were arguing with each other.”

“Male or female?” Zack asks.

For a second Cloud doesn’t answer. He doesn’t seem reluctant about saying something so much as unsure about what to say, and when he finally does spit it out, he still seems like he wants to hang multiple disclaimers on it. “Not sure. It was really low—like when somebody whispers from the doorway, except it was coming from right in front of me.”

“Like from the box?” Zack says. “Maybe we should’ve—”

“I looked when I was putting the files back in,” Cloud says, dead serious about it. “No stone chips. And I didn’t see any in the office. But—Zack, look, I know we have to check things out but do you think the PPE is going to do anything? We don’t know what that chip is yet or how it worked on us. And Cissnei doesn’t even have SOLDIER enhancements.”

Zack exhales slowly. He’s not irritated with Cloud; he can’t be, when he’s been thinking the same thing. But at the same time he knows he has to be the team lead here, and there are multiple reasons why they can’t just wait for the chip to be fully analyzed, among them that they’ll probably need R&D at some point for that. “We’re not going in there to mine anything, Cloud, I promise. But we need a walk-through, and we need—you found that tunnel on the map and if the sites are connected, I think that’s important for us to know. But that’s it, we’re just checking out the lay of the land. Cissnei might disagree but I’ve got no intention of going back to Midgar looking like Heidegger, or letting you end up that way either.”

“I think she’s more worried than she lets on,” Cloud says. He’s a little calmer now, but still fidgeting instead of finishing his dinner. “She shifts her holster if one of us leaves her with the other, did you notice?”

No, Zack has to admit, but he stops himself from saying so. And from looking like Cloud just caught him out being too distracted to notice something like that. “Well, even Cissnei’s going back to Midgar in one piece if I have anything to do about it,” Zack says. “I don’t like the Turks, but that’s why I’m not gonna give them or anyone else an excuse to say we SOLDIERs don’t live up to our word. So nobody goes off on their own, all right? Barret and Dyne don’t seem super-thrilled at the idea either, and part of the brief is to keep the locals from rioting.”

Cloud snorts at that. Then he nods and takes up his spoon again, going back to eating. “Okay,” he says after about a minute. “Hey…I still want to figure this out. I’m not going to run from the mission.”

“Never thought you would, Spike,” Zack says, smiling.

And he means it, but also he has to admit that making Cloud feel better doesn’t actually make him feel that much better. He doesn’t want to run from here, but…he’s tired. He needs time to regroup, and think about what he hasn’t been thinking about and what he didn’t just get off his chest with Cloud, and he needs to send that damn update to Angeal.

So he gets himself and Cloud back to their quarters, and keeps up the cheerful chatter till Cloud turns in for the night. Zack tells the man not to stay up and that he’s just checking a couple emails in the bathroom, and then he goes in there and sends Angeal an email.

He lays out the facts again, and then adds in that they think Lucrecia Crescent may be a person of interest. He also re-raises that they’re taking precautions with the mine tour partly because they think something could be distorting people’s senses, and mentions what happened in the hangar as part of that. But he doesn’t…he doesn’t make it clear that Lucrecia’s name had just popped into his head, even though he does include that he’d identified her.

Then he stares at his draft and thinks about it, and finally adds a note that if Angeal can get away for a quick call at any point, Zack will make the time for a more detailed briefing. That does flag it, and for especially sensitive matters, which Zack thinks this falls into it, protocol is to limit written comms whenever possible. So that’s how he handles it to get him to sleep that night.

Notes:

Yes, I named Vincent's mother after a Japanese goddess and yes, I've done that before. I like the name.

Chapter 19: Past

When Valentine comes in again, he brings augmented food supplies that include everything Sephiroth listed. He’s also over an hour and a half late.

“Heidegger did seem amenable to the approach you suggested, but he’s clearly worried about someone back in Midgar. I had the impression that he owes a report back to them and that they’ll be much more skeptical about your whereabouts without further proof,” he explains as he lays out the items. His hands are trembling a little and his eyes don’t only have dark circles, but also are beginning to take on the clouded look of sleep-deprivation; they’re probably not also bloodshot because he’s putting in drops. “I assume that would be Hojo. He did say he’s going to wait one more day, but then he wants to launch a search.”

“Using local resources,” Sephiroth surmises. “So that any adverse finding reflects on them and not him.”

Valentine nods as he sets down the last item for Sephiroth. Then he shuffles back—he’s still cautious enough to have his coat swept away from his gun holster—and goes to a cooler set just on the threshold. He takes a couple packets of blood out of that and then goes to deposit them in the usual place for Vincent.

“Hojo hasn’t tried to contact me again,” Valentine says. “Does that hint at anything?”

“With what I know now, I’m surprised he contacted you in the first place,” Sephiroth has to say. He was reading and rereading all the way up to hearing Valentine’s step in the hall, and in retrospect he should have used the warning to recalibrate his approach to the other man. But there are so many connections he hadn’t seen before that he can’t help seeing now and it’s almost impossible to get a clear sight beyond them, lest one strike directly into him. “He tried to eliminate you, and then took in my mother at least half out of spite, I think…”

From the way Valentine’s mouth tightens, the other man agrees about that. And he feels guilt-stricken over it, of course, but also this is one of the few times Sephiroth has detected a trace of anger in him too.

“And then she and V—your son, they came here for sanctuary,” Sephiroth points out. He moves up to the bars as he does and starts to pull food and water items into the cell; hunger and thirst are starting to gnaw and without a fully-considered strategy he can’t keep favoring pride over focus. “He had to have thought of that.”

“He did. I think he delayed searching for them initially because he didn’t want to admit it—admit he’d let loose someone as dangerous as Vincent was at that point. And also Vincent was a member of the Turks—I don’t know if I mentioned that before, I’m sorry if I didn’t,” Valentine says. He takes up a seat by the cooler and leans briefly against the doorway before pulling himself away, even though from his body posture he sorely needs the additional support. “He didn’t have many allies outside of Nibelheim proper at that point, so once they got over the first mountain he couldn’t do anything on his own. He did eventually—people did come asking, but I’d hidden them—your mother and Vincent—I’d hidden them here in the old tunnels. And your mother was gone by then anyway.”

Sephiroth pauses in the middle of uncapping a bottle of water. Even though he’d gathered that, it still—it stings, now that she’s no longer some ethereal and deeply-hidden longing but a real personality, with real traces left behind in the hands of others besides himself. And that dream he’d had only makes him feel the sting more. “Based on her notes, she had a couple months here. Hojo might not have had the connections but he’s never been shy about pretending he does. He didn’t try and call you back then?”

Valentine is silent for a moment, but his face has hardened. When he finally speaks, it’s in a measured and deliberate way, lacking his characteristic diffidence, and that bears some similarity to Vincent’s more lucid moments. “He did. But he never believed I understood half of what he was doing, let alone what it could lead to. And I don’t think—” the firmness vanishes, showing more brittleness than his son “—he ever thought she c—that your mother cared about me more than was necessary for her job. So when I told him we’d lost contact after my illness and her transfer, he seemed satisfied.”

Which does sound like Hojo. The man would call out of concern his misdeeds were being found out, but if Valentine had sounded even a little dismayed that Hojo’s machinations had destroyed a relationship, Hojo would probably have been too distracted by his own smug sense of victory to make certain he was safe.

“He didn’t seem to think either of them were going to survive without his assistance,” Valentine adds. He glances over at Vincent’s corner. “He didn’t know what Lucrecia had been trying to do to save Vincent, and he never had the slightest understanding of Chaos’ powers, but he was very sure about her. I think he actually had planned for her to die during childbirth but she’d been too stubborn for that.”

Sephiroth swallows his mouthful of water more roughly than he’d intended. He doesn’t choke, but he still has to wait a moment to ensure that. “He knew the Jenova cells would cross the placental barrier, you mean.”

“And that she didn’t have the…treatments he’d performed on your embryo to counteract their effects,” Valentine says, looking back at Sephiroth. He only holds Sephiroth’s gaze for a moment before dropping his own. “She did suffer. I tried, but even to the end she was having to explain to me—”

“It wasn’t your area,” Sephiroth says flatly. He can’t absolve the man of his guilt even if he wanted to, which he doesn’t, but he doesn’t want to wallow in it alongside Valentine either. He opens up a package of food, being purposefully loud with the packaging so that it catches Valentine’s attention. “She did actually survive much longer than expected—she survived the entire trip here, with Vincent along, and I take it that he wasn’t nearly as cooperative at that point. You didn’t have the drugs to manage him yet.”

Though phrasing it like that is a little too brisk for Valentine’s tastes and his body language shifts subtly but distinctly backwards. “No, but Vincent always has some level of awareness. He fights for control, he doesn’t only rely on drugs—but it exhausts him. It was agony for both of them, and I can’t personally imagine how…your mother fought for it. She fought all the way to the end, I saw that with my own eyes.”

Sephiroth has half a piece of bread on his lips. His stomach is growling but his desire to taste anything…he pushes the bread in anyway, making himself chew and swallow it. He wants every detail of his mother but every time Valentine mentions her, it makes Sephiroth think about how he only ever seems to gain those through someone else’s charity.

Besides, he can’t allow himself to be bogged down in his own resentment either if he’s to find out what truly happened when his mother arrived, let alone climb out of here. “She must have had some source of resistance if the Jenova cells didn’t kill her right away,” he says, watching Valentine closely. “Hojo probably was keeping her medicated, but after she and Vincent escaped, it would’ve been too long between here and there and somehow, Vincent didn’t kill her for her Jenova cells. And you didn’t know what to give either of them right away.”

“I tried what I could,” Valentine says, frowning. He doesn’t seem to only take Sephiroth’s words as an accusation, which he thinks he deserves anyway and which is probably why he looks confused, too. “But no, even to find what I currently give Vincent, it took years.”

“So there must have been something else. From her notes, I think she was starting to theorize about that,” Sephiroth says. He starts to reach for a pile, then stops once Valentine’s eyes track to it. He’s rather certain that Valentine only needs a glance to recognize any given sheet of his mother’s work, even if the man is across the room from it, and is proven right when he sees Valentine’s expression. “She wanted to live, if only to try and recover me. She was looking for a cure—and she’d been looking for that when she went to Hojo’s lab in the first place. She was trying to test it there, even after she and Vincent were caught—she was testing something that ended up having some inhibitory effect on Jenova. It’s only that when she first went, she wasn’t looking to cure herself. She thought she was looking for a way to cure you.”

Valentine inhales sharply. And so does someone else, though Valentine doesn’t seem to notice—and thankfully, he twists about to stare at a different corner, missing both Sephiroth’s twitch and the ripple of the shadows in Vincent’s corner. Vincent’s heartbeat is suddenly present in the room with them but Sephiroth pushes that to the back of his mind, focusing on Valentine.

“If I could tell her not to bother—I did tell her, but I—if I could have made her not bother,” Valentine finally says, in a very quiet, rough voice. “Yes. Yes, she did. She thought—the aftereffects of the accident on me, because my physical injuries were not that bad at first but they didn’t heal…she thought there was something else involved. She went to his lab because she thought she could find out more about how he’d sabotaged things because I didn’t have the equipment or the resources here to do that.”

This unexplained mineral she’d been tracing, Sephiroth wants to say. To shout, to pick up those reports and throw them through the bars because everything he’s saying he knows Valentine has already thought about, has already looked into, has already hidden from everyone else. And why? Why, when it’d killed the one person Valentine seems to mourn most? Why would he let it, and so her, be forgotten?

Instead Sephiroth makes himself take a deep breath. “She took a sample from the accident site. But she also took herself—she’d been exposed, she was right there with you in the cave and it’s only because she was standing behind you that she wasn’t as injured. But that sample wasn’t inert, that site you both investigated wasn’t either, and she was exposed too. And Hojo never accounted for that when he implanted Jenova into my mother and me because he didn’t think Chaos was important. That’s what you’ve realized, isn’t it?”

Valentine inhales sharply, but in his face Sephiroth detects a certain degree of relief. “Yes, in part. I certainly think Chaos’ contribution to her surviving so long hasn’t been fully investigated—it may also explain why you’ve been able to resist Jenova, compared to the other infected people.”

“The placental exchange was two-way, you’re implying,” Sephiroth says. He had thought about that, about that and about what Vincent had said in finding it difficult to differentiate voices. Though as far as Sephiroth’s own experience goes, Jenova wreaking havoc in his head has absolutely no comparison to his dream about his mother. “I was Jenova’s path into her, and in turn she gave me a shield.”

“You weren’t responsible for the decisions leading up to your birth,” Valentine says. He shifts on his knees, then starts to stand. He’s angling his body as if he’s going to approach the cell. “I don’t think Lucrecia would’ve wanted you to think that way, and even to the end, she’d been trying to find a way to save—”

“Did she also find a way to keep you from reacting to her?” Sephiroth asks. He deliberately times it for just before he takes a drink of water, so when he looks back at the other man, he’s catching both Valentine’s initial reaction and the expression the man tries to put on in its place. “She had Jenova cells in her, and both you and Vincent had exposure to Chaos. If he reacts, then you should too.”

Valentine had not planned Sephiroth to go in this direction, unlike with everything else. That’s what his initial look of shock says. But he’d given Sephiroth the data, and moreover, had let Sephiroth analyze it himself rather than providing only his own conclusions. He can’t have expected Sephiroth to not independently test all assumptions…and something in the way he’s trying to compose himself also speaks to that, as if he’s taken off-guard but as if he—he still thinks it’s a fair blow.

“I was never merged with Chaos,” Valentine says after a moment. “Vincent actually has—I was exposed, yes, and I have the scars but I don’t—”

“Are you certain you don’t have any voices in your head?” Sephiroth prods, and there is a flicker of something in Valentine’s eyes now, too fleeting to fully read but too glinting to assign to guilt. “And what exactly is your idea of finding a cure for me? If you think my resistance to Jenova’s mind is down to Chaos, then do you think just by keeping me here and exposing me to more of their traces—”

Valentine takes a half-step back, shaking his head. His hand briefly goes to his leg as well and Sephiroth stiffens, but then it goes up to rake through his hair without coming especially close to his gun holster. “I don’t have Jenova cells in me, that was never transferred,” he says, voice lower but growing more agitated. “Yes, I—I reacted to her, to your mother, but she came here for help with Vincent and I wasn’t going to list—I wasn’t going to turn her away and it—what I—it wasn’t bad, I could ignore them. I can ignore it—”

He shakes his head again, hand still in his hair, and it’s considerably more violent. Sephiroth shifts back without thinking, then puts his water and food aside as he moves towards the back of the cell. This is not quite what Sephiroth had been expecting from the other man—defensiveness, yes, but something physical seems to be going on too. “Ignore what—”

“I had to help her,” Valentine is saying now, and his fingers are bending in to dig at his scalp and not simply pulling through his hair. His sleeve has pulled down his wrist and the scars on the back of his hand are standing out in unnatural relief under the harsh lighting. “I had to help her and my son. I knew that even if I didn’t know how—I knew she was losing herself, I knew she wasn’t going to last long enough, she already sounded so weak. I did feel that with her, even before she admitted it to me and I couldn’t—I had to stop them—silence them—”

Something thumps wildly nearby. Sephiroth jerks at the noise, banging his elbow into the wall behind him, but then realizes that Valentine is standing too far from the walls to have made it. The thumping hasn’t stopped either, but is growing louder and beating faster—Vincent’s heartbeat, it’s Vincent’s heartbeat. And when Sephiroth risks a glance to that corner, he sees the shadow of a huge, crouching horned figure.

Facing Valentine, who continues to clutch his head as he rambles on. He doesn’t move from that spot but something about him makes Sephiroth’s gaze jump as if the man is trying to—is preparing to lunge. Something about his—skin, the way it’s growing paler, but also something…something in the air around them. “She was losing. We brought her down here to try and grow the Chaos proportion but it wasn’t working—”

“So that is what you were thinking with me,” Sephiroth mutters. More of an afterthought, to be honest; he doesn’t take his eyes away from Valentine, and in his head the little attention he can spare from the man is devoted to shoring up his defenses against that…not Jenova but some kind of equally insidious murmur. “You’re hoping I can change enough—”

Valentine doesn’t seem to hear. “It wasn’t working and I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t stand by again, I couldn’t bear to lose her voice, I couldn’t—”

“She said she’d rather die,” Vincent suddenly growls. Vincent and more than, with the way his voice seems to drum up from the very stones. “We both heard that, she said that—”

“I couldn’t,” Valentine snarls back. He wrenches around to Vincent’s corner, his hands coming down so Sephiroth has a brief look at his face before it’s hidden again.

But that’s enough. The strange, glossy texture of his skin and the way his features seem to only sit on top of something stirring beneath, that’s enough to confirm. Valentine is not just himself, he’s also more than. He’s not the same as Vincent—not Chaos in there, whatever remnants Sephiroth has finding no resonance with him, but he is like Vincent in that.

“I couldn’t. And I can’t stand—you don’t understand, I can’t stand how she sounds—not just her but how they drown her out—” Valentine gestures wildly towards the door “—you don’t hear her anymore, Vincent, but if you could hear—if you could hear all of them—”

“Wh—sounds?” Sephiroth snaps. He goes stiff, staring at Valentine because—because Vincent hadn’t always seemed clear about what time or person he’d meant, but that hadn’t meant anything, not with the way the other man is unclear about everything. But Valentine should know who is and isn’t alive. He should know who he means, and he shouldn’t talk about them as if they’re still here. “What do you mean—I thought you said she’d died.”

“And I think she can hear you now,” Valentine growls as he pivots back to Sephiroth. His eyes are still human brown but the rest of him is the white of bone, the white of—of something harder than human skin, hard and gleaming and Sephiroth hisses when he realizes that Valentine’s skin has turned to plates. “They’re saying that and I wanted to save you—you can fight Jenova off, but if she’s hearing you, then she’s going to try and reach you and then they’ll try to silence her. They want Jenova, and she can’t fight through all of them. You’re pointing them to each other and she’s going to lose and then I won’t be able to find her again—”

“Jenova isn’t here,” Sephiroth says. He presses himself against the back wall, watching Valentine for any directional movement. Valentine still has hands, still could use the gun on his thigh, and his fingers are flexing dangerously close to that. “Jenova. I would know—if I’m the only one with her cells here, then I would know so which her do you mean—”

And then, damn it, Jenova is in his head. Curling in with all the delicate subtlety of smoke wisping under a door while Sephiroth is distracted, then blazing into full conflagration at the absolute worst time. Valentine sucks his breath and Sephiroth knows that whatever the man carries lets him tell when Jenova is present, too—and it doesn’t seem nearly as forbearing.

Sephiroth’s hands are already going up to grab at his skull and the mess Jenova is making means he can’t stop himself, but he manages to dive to the left, twisting his body as he does; he has to hope that plus the bars is sufficient to skew Valentine’s aim because he can’t spare any more of his mind for evasive tactics. Jenova had sneaked over the threshold but she’s not fully in him yet and Sephiroth wills her back out, wills her to where he can boot her back into the darkness and slam the door on her screaming as quickly as he can.

But even as he does, he registers that Valentine is moving too. Towards the cage. And as Jenova slashes ribbons out of Sephiroth in a last petulant effort, the world suddenly explodes. He’s briefly deaf—he sees but doesn’t hear the bars nearest him rattle. He frantically rolls the other way, but he’s still dazed from her attack and he can’t quite process what’s going on before him for a few seconds.

When he does, he scrambles back against the wall again. Valentine is slumped halfway out the door, one leg still inside the room and moving awkwardly to get its foot braced against the floor. His gun is on the floor, muzzle still smoking, close enough to the bars that Sephiroth could probably reach out and retrieve it—but so is Vincent. Sprawled on one side with his arms and legs out towards his father, a few stray streaks of black fur retreating up his shoulders and neck, and blood pooling under his head.

Vincent is still alive, and from the way he stiffens when his father finally manages to get that foot under himself and fully push through the doorway, conscious. He snarls and Valentine makes an agonized noise that’s half-sob, half-growl, but…continues heaving himself over the threshold. Doesn’t shut the door behind him, so Sephiroth can hear Valentine crawling all the way down the hall.

Maybe thirty yards out, Valentine pulls himself up onto his feet, but his gait is still that of the heavily wounded. He staggers off until even Sephiroth can’t hear the man anymore—to where, Sephiroth has no idea.

“No. No, he’s going deeper.” Vincent answers the question Sephiroth hadn’t realized he’d voiced aloud, then coughs wetly. The sound catches Sephiroth up short for a moment and he finds himself tensing all over, only to sag a little when Vincent continues “I thought she was dead. He said she was dead. And I’d—I tried to kill her. She said she’d rather—so I tried but he stopped me, said she’d died. When I was back up he said she’d died.”

And as simple as that, it comes together. “He lied,” Sephiroth says with complete confidence. “I dreamed her earlier—she showed me the pattern in the data, and I thought it was a dream but it was really her, speaking to me. She’s not dead, and she’s still here somewhere—Lucrecia, my mother. He hid her here. He hid her from us—from everyone.”

Vincent coughs again, but it’s close enough to agreement with Sephiroth. “I can’t tell—I thought I heard…sometimes, but I can’t tell—I couldn’t tell always when we were in Nibelheim, between her and Jenova, and I can’t…probably crazy, too…”

The pool of blood is spreading so Sephiroth pushes off the wall, then cries out as his head seems to topple off his neck. It doesn’t, of course, but it feels that way and he has to lurch onto his hands and knees and then hold his head with one arm till he steadies. Then, grunting, he makes his way to Vincent. Papers rustle and crackle under him—he grimaces and hesitates, about to move some out of the way, but then jerks his head up as Vincent lets out a murky, painful noise.

“Your father thinks imprisoning people underground for years is the solution to everything. And mine thought an alien being was the path to human perfection. That’s insanity,” Sephiroth mutters as he pulls up against the bars. “You’re…rude, at worst.”

Before, Valentine had shot Vincent in the limbs, and while it’d temporarily incapacitated him, he’d healed almost instantly. But this time Sephiroth can see a gory mess on one side of Vincent’s neck, and while the man’s healing has kept him from immediately bleeding out, it doesn’t seem to be closing up the wound quickly enough. He puts one hand through the bars and holds it over Vincent for a second; when the other man doesn’t move, he carefully lowers it to press over the wound.

“I didn’t drink the last packet,” Vincent rasps. His eyes briefly close when Sephiroth touches him, only to squint open again. “I was…not clear but I wanted to know—if you hear more than I do, then I wanted to know…”

“So do I. My mother—if she wanted to die, then that should have been respected,” Sephiroth says. He leans against the bars and that seems to help reduce his dizziness. Less blood seems to be seeping out now that he’s pinching Vincent’s flesh together, but that’s not going to be enough—then his eyes fall on the gun. “Absolutely no one seems to have respected her when she was alive, damn them all…you trying to kill her might have been the one time.”

“He always loads two shots,” Vincent says, sensing what Sephiroth is looking at. “He heals—Chaos is in me, not him, but you’re right, he got something that makes him heal faster. She gave it to me to get me off Hojo’s table and out of Nibelheim, and he has some of it too…”

One shot might just open the door of the cell, if Sephiroth can angle the gun correctly. And he considers that, but now that his mind is steadying, he’s also thinking more clearly. He can’t simply walk out of this cell now—he has to find his mother, and deal with Valentine since he’d bet the other man is on his way to wherever she is. But also he has to find out what’s happened to him down here and how to…not how to stop it, he thinks, because that was Valentine’s mistake. He has to find out how to make the outcome different. How to make it so whatever has happened, whatever changes he’s been through, he remains himself. No, not only that: he needs to take what’s happened and make it his.

And he can’t do that with just a gunshot. He can’t do that with just himself either; even if he can retrieve the gun, he recognizes that two bullets is not a good margin for the very precise aim he’ll need, and when he can’t even keep his own head steady. He’ll need better to get to his mother and Valentine.

And also, he’ll admit, he doesn’t want to see Vincent remain like this. Frustrating as the man has been, he’s also—he attacked his own father just now, and by both his and his father’s words, he’d been the only one who’d even attempted to carry out Sephiroth’s mother’s last wishes. For all his mental issues, he’s the only one who seems to have any clear idea what it means to make a sacrifice. And that deserves better.

“You said it’s clearer when you had my blood in your mouth,” Sephiroth says, looking down at Vincent. “That you can tell who we all are. If it’s clearer, can you manage Chaos?”

Vincent understands immediately what Sephiroth intends. He stares up at Sephiroth, his whitened lips starting to spasm at the edges, and then nods ever-so-slowly. “He’s—my father,” he grunts, traces of wariness in his eyes. “Still.”

“Well, I won’t order you to do anything to him if I find my way into your head, I promise you that,” Sephiroth mutters. “But I will do what I need to if he tries to stop me again—he’s not going to keep us down here. He’s not going to save us, any of us—he can’t even see what he’s been doing to you or my mother. If you want that to change, you can’t stand in my way. And you have to help me out of here.”

Vincent’s eyes flutter closed. Then snap open, making it clear that he’s not falling unconscious. They stay open as Sephiroth works his arm further through the bars and puts his wrist to the man’s mouth.

He feels Vincent’s lips work and the scrape of teeth against his skin, but Vincent’s too weak—Sephiroth puts his other arm through and gets his hand under Vincent’s head, then drives his wrist onto Vincent’s canines. His head hits the bars by accident and he jerks back, but by then Vincent has revived enough to suck at his arm. Vincent’s hand comes up to wrap around his elbow and drag at him, banging him into the bars again. His dizziness roars back full force and he slumps against them, thinking belatedly that he should have taken the gun to ensure he can pry Vincent off once the man’s had enough.

Though it…doesn’t hurt, past the initial flash of pain. Sephiroth only feels very tired, and very welcoming of the dark haze descending over him, and he…he struggles to remember why he needs to stay awake. Mother…

…Sephiroth…?

Chapter 20: Present

When Zack wakes up, his inbox says that Angeal got the emails and opened them, but there’s no reply. He can’t tell whether Angeal actually read it all or not, but since he doesn’t see any replies to Angeal on any other emails, probably the other man was just skimming the subject lines during a quick break. Zack hadn’t changed the subject lines to flag that they were anything but the daily update, and for a moment he thinks he might have messed up there.

But then Cloud calls to him from the bathroom, saying that Barret and Dyne are on their way in for the meeting and going to be early. Zack compromises and replies to the last update email saying nothing new came in overnight for him, which also will bump it up in Angeal’s inbox, and then he and Cloud go to get Cissnei and try to squeeze in breakfast first.

As it turns out, they run into Barret in the canteen, because he knows where they start the coffee machines first in the morning and is topping up. Dyne comes in from the hallway while they’re exchanging greetings and so they end up having the meeting in a conference room off the canteen, grabbing bites of food while Dyne flicks through maps on the room’s wall-screen.

Dyne’s polite about it, but he makes it clear he doesn’t think that much of the maps Cloud found in the warehouse. They’re really old—fair—and don’t have anything on them showing engineer sign-off—also fair—and he doesn’t have the manpower to be on standby to excavate anything infilled. But that’s where Barret breaks in.

“Not saying it’s a good idea, man, but I don’t think we’re talking about concrete with this,” Barret says.

“So there is a tunnel?” Cissnei asks.

Both men briefly hesitate, and Dyne gives Barret a bit of an annoyed look. But also a nod, though it’s of the ‘you did it, you handle it’ kind, so Barret answers. “This area, there’s always a tunnel, it just depends on what people put in it when they finished. And if anything happened after—usually that’s the problem.”

“Not stable, lot of subsidence because of the drainage,” Dyne chimes in. He studies the map on the wall again, then exhales. “I’d usually say first we go for some scans, but that’s what Barret is saying—the rock around here’s not that good for it. Can bend the rays and things, and you get echoes like it’s clear when it’s solid and solid when it’s clear…”

“Well, we don’t need to go down anything, we just want to test whether this map is right, because this tunnel doesn’t show up on any of the others,” Zack says. Then he glances over at Cissnei, sensing something, but though she’s tight-lipped, she doesn’t offer up any disagreement. “It does look like we could check for an entrance without having to open up anything, because I don’t want to have to go through degassing again if we hit a pocket—but let me know if I’m wrong.”

Barret and Dyne share a look again, and then Dyne heaves his shoulders. “You can always take a look,” he says reluctantly. “Gas…appreciate the thought, Commander, but you pretty much can’t plan around that.”

“Oh, yeah, I mean, we’re still going in with PPE,” Zack reassures them. “Wasn’t going to leave that behind.”

From the way Dyne relaxes, he had been thinking Zack might cite some SOLDIER enhancement ability over their recommendations. “Right. That’s the way you want…all right, yeah, we can do it. But I just want to warn you that it’s not just walking through, even if you just want to see if there’s an old entryway.”

“Why not?” Cissnei asks. She starts to raise her hand, but then lowers it and smiles when Barret clicks the screen display back a couple maps. “Right, this looks like it’s an intersection and it’s—”

“Not really like that inside, ma’am.” Dyne ducks his head in apology, but his expression is just a little on the side of tired professional lecturing the newbie. “I don’t blame you, the map says so, but there’s a little space between that and how it looks…this tunnel you’re looking for is old enough, even if they just boarded over the entry, it’s probably gotten a lot of icing on it.”

“Gotta explain the lingo,” Barret mutters, nudging Dyne. Then he nods at Cissnei. “Water comes through the rock and when it runs over anything, pipes, wood, your spare gear, you name it, it leaves this scum behind. You don’t keep wiping it off, the stuff dries and it gets to looking just like the rock. Probably not so thick you couldn’t crack it with your fist but you wouldn’t know it to look at it.”

“Got it,” Zack says. “Then we’ll just tap as we go.”

This is not the best way to do that, say Barret’s and Dyne’s faces, but they just mutter something about seeing how things look first and then going from there. The point is, they’re on board to add this into the tour itinerary and they don’t seem that worried about it so long as PPE is used and no one leaves the main tunnel without them, and that all fits just fine with what Zack thinks. So that’s settled and they can turn off the maps and just eat breakfast together.

Near the end of that, Zack gets a ping on his phone that he knows he can’t ignore. He excuses himself to the bathroom with a nod to Cloud, who moves out of the way to let him pass. Both Barret and Dyne offer absentminded directions where to go, but they’re much more interested in telling Cissnei all about a funny incident on last night’s shift and she’s doing an excellent job of pretending she’s interested in that and not in whether either of them have heard any recent rumors about Heidegger. So that keeps her from paying too much attention to Zack either.

Which he thinks about because that ping was the special warzone ping and that means Angeal has finally messaged him back. The nearest official comms room is way too far to go from here, but he remembers from Cloud’s research that the bathrooms aren’t monitored on the inside. He ducks in, has to pretend he’s washing a spot out of his shirt while another man finishes up at the urinal, and then goes into the last stall and takes his phone out.

It almost slips through his fingers into the toilet. Zack curses and grabs it in time, but he’s shaking his head at himself as he unlocks the screen; he’s had his coffee by now, and some sleep before that.

Anyway, Angeal’s message…isn’t a reply to Zack’s update email like he’d been expecting, but is a direct message in a fresh thread. And it just says: Make sure I’m across everything in Corel from now on.

Which he already is, and Zack isn’t sure why Angeal would say something like that when the man knows—he gives himself a shake. He’s letting this all get under his damn skin, and reading it into other people now and he hates that almost as much as he hates how he still…can’t make up his mind about yesterday. Sure, he did manage to get to sleep and it was a decent sleep and started to make up for sitting up in the hangar with those bodies, but now the benefits of that feel like wet tissue paper, just falling apart as he starts moving.

He can have Cloud start copying Angeal directly onto new search queries they put in, he thinks. They don’t normally do that to keep from flooding Angeal’s inbox with admin stuff like initial receipt and update notifications, and because they filter down the raw data to what the man really needs to know, but if that’s what Angeal wants, then that’s what Zack can do.

“I can do a rule to try making all the forward lines the same so he can filter against it,” Cloud says as they get into the rental car.

“Yeah, sounds good—you can do that when we get there, I don’t want you to throw up all over,” Zack says. Then he winces. “Sorry, that sounded…”

“It’s okay, I get what you mean,” Cloud says. He even offers Zack a small smile, like he should be the one doing the reassuring here.

Then Cissnei comes up and Cloud blanks out his expression, though he does adjust his seat forward so she has more room to squeeze into the back. Zack hadn’t been looking for it so much before, but after yesterday, he can’t help seeing how the two of them are acting around each other. It’s not exactly tiptoeing because neither is going out of their way to avoid the other, but it does feel a little artificial, how they’re pretending they’re not eyeballing each other. Cissnei, Zack’s seen that before, but from Cloud it’s very different.

Thankfully for the drive up, Barret is coming along to help direct them up some access roads that he says will be better than whatever their phone GPS is saying; Dyne’s driving himself back. Barret doesn’t seem to notice a thing, or if he does, it doesn’t seem to stop him from breaking in every couple minutes to point out a local landmark, or at minimum, a place where something funny happened to him. Even with better directions, it takes them over an hour to get out to the starting point, but the stories do help keep things light.

But then they’re at the tunnel entrance. Dyne got there ahead of them and he thought to get a couple tents set up where they can put on their PPE and check fit, which takes a little time. Zack thinks Cloud goes off to do a few last emails as well, and then Cissnei excuses herself to take one last call, which extends the prep time. But that can’t take forever, and so eventually, they walk into the tunnel.

The first thing Zack thinks is that it’s pretty well-lit. Which is a little stupid; Dyne knows what he’s doing and clearly cares about doing it the safe, right way, so this was never going to be like walking into a horror movie. It just says more about where Zack’s mind is at that moment.

Anyway, the tunnel isn’t too bad and even has enough height that Zack doesn’t have to bend over, though he had to resettle his sword harness to be sure about his pommel and every so often he has to duck a support beam. But then Cloud reminds him that this isn’t actually the tunnel they want and they’re just using it because it’s a nice, easy way to get into the general vicinity.

Zack sighs behind his PPE helmet—the gases they’re worried about don’t absorb well through skin, so they opted not to do the full-on suits for better mobility—and just enjoys the space while he has it. According to Dyne, who’s leading the way, this route adds an extra half-mile but it’s a pretty gradual slope and there aren’t any major obstacles, so they eat that up in no time.

Then they get to the first of the cross-tunnels they’ll have to get through, and it starts getting uncomfortable. The tunnel ceiling is still pretty high and there are places to string wires for lights and fans, but it’s a lot narrower. They have room to swing their arms but can’t walk more than one at a time anymore, and Zack does start to think about which sword angles he can still manage.

Though he doesn’t see any signs of monsters, or even of regular animals like bats and rats. “Gas kept them out, hasn’t been long enough for any of them to work in yet,” Barret, who’s taking up the back, says when Zack comments on that. “And there’s no good ore here, that’s what all those monsters we warn new people about like to feed off of.”

“Yeah, right,” Zack. The place does feel…not alive. He doesn’t want to say dead, because that comes off creepier than this is, like something is actively sucking away all the life and that’s not the feel he gets off of it.

Honestly, the crowding aside, it’s actually a lot easier to be in this mine than it was to be in the hangar, or even in Valentine’s office. Which does make Zack think a second—it doesn’t really strike him as a ‘séance’ or ‘ghost story’ kind of place, aside from being abandoned. Even taking into account that they’ve just put in the lighting and cleaned it up a little, the tunnels so far have run pretty straight with no blind turns or suspicious stains or weird-looking features. Zack has been in maintenance shafts back in Midgar that gave him more of the creeps.

And…well, he’s not hearing anything down here. He can hear the buzzing of the bulbs and the hum of the fans and obviously he can hear them walking through it, but nothing else besides that. More importantly, no weird sense that he might hear something he doesn’t want to. It’s actually starting to be relaxing.

“Here’s where we get to the vent,” Dyne says.

He stops where the tunnel bulges out a little to one side, like they’d started making it turn but then decided to stop. It’s not that much more space, but as long as Barret hangs back and Cissnei puts one foot up on the side of the wall, she and Zack and Cloud can squeeze shoulder-to-shoulder to see what Dyne means.

Dyne’s tucked himself into the bulge and across from him, there’s a much smaller tunnel. Holes bored around its perimeter probably are for the metal grill that’s lying on the ground in front of it. Zack eases down into a crouch and looks through the tunnel, and he can easily see that there’s a lamp placed about ten yards in…but it’s going to be tight. Not so tight he’s suddenly worried about getting stuck but tight enough that he and Cloud will have to take off their swords.

“It gets better about twenty, thirty yards in—you can’t see it because of the bend,” Dyne says, leaning forward to gesture at one side of the tunnel. “That said, it opens up there because of the seeps. So it’s not as stable. We put in some temporary shoring and did scans, and we’re pretty sure nothing’s gonna fall on your heads so long as we’re not messing around in there. And…well, Commander, I don’t want to tell you what to do with your sword, but…you might want to check that before you get in there.”

“Gets more stable nearer the other end, when it opens out,” Barret adds. “Air’s better, too.”

“Right,” Zack mutters as he turns. “Back up, I don’t want to slice off something by accident.”

Barret grins at him, amused, and does so. Zack gets his sword off, then works around so that Cloud can step into the same place and do the same thing. They do some test maneuvering around the opening, but quickly determine that there’s no good way to carry his sword in. If it’s on his back, it’s going to scrape the walls and ceiling and even a minor rockfall would need to be cleared before anyone behind could go through. If he tries to push the sword ahead of himself or under—well, Zack would do it if there was a fight on, but if he doesn’t have to think about not cutting off his own kneecaps, he doesn’t want to.

Anyway, it’s just a walk-through. They don’t need all three of them, so Zack tells Cloud to stay back with Barret—who’s going to be the safety watch on this end—while he and Cissnei go on with Dyne. Cloud doesn’t look thrilled about this and keeps looking into the tunnel as if he thinks it might change shape between checks, but takes Zack’s sword readily enough.

Dyne goes in first to make sure nothing’s changed in there since the last time they were in it. Once he gets to the bend, he calls back and Cissnei goes next. They’re spacing themselves out too so if one person gets stuck, it doesn’t also trap the rest of them, so Zack and Cloud have about a minute to wait. And Barret’s gone back down the other tunnel a few yards, checking something with the wires.

“That thing I heard trying to say my name,” Cloud says. Abrupt and very low, so that Zack has to turn and check to be sure Cloud’s not just talking to himself. “I think…I think it was trying to say something else too. But I couldn’t make it out.”

“Your name? Wait, when—did you—you hear anything again? Or was it just yesterday?” Zack asks, with half an eye on Barret.

Who doesn’t seem to be paying attention to them, but who does seem to not like the wires a little further back the way they came. He takes out a walkie-talkie and starts barking into it at the people still at the mine entrance to check on this and that—though then he glances over and makes the universal ‘okay’ sign. “Nothing big, I just don’t want this shit shorting out while you’re in there. We got flashlights if it happens but it’d be better if it didn’t.”

Zack gives the man a thumbs-up, and then turns back as he hears Cissnei call that it’s clear for him. He calls back that he’s coming but gives Cloud a look.

“Just yesterday,” Cloud mutters. He ducks away from Zack’s gaze and rubs at the side of his head as if he’s getting a headache. “But I was thinking about it again. We didn’t really go over it before.”

Then he stands back, holding Zack’s sword. Zack starts to crouch down, but then pauses to clap a hand on Cloud’s shoulder. “Look, we can talk about that right after we’re done here,” he says. “Just not in front of—”

“Yeah, I know.” Cloud seems all right, he’s meeting Zack’s eyes and not trembling or anything like that, and he even gestures for Zack to go on. “Just…seems kind of quiet in here. Right?”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Zack says, sidestepping the question. Then he winces as Cissnei calls his name again. He yells back that he’s coming, he just needed to check his bootlace, and puts his head into the tunnel. “It’s not like we want to be hearing anything.”

Cloud grunts. Zack glances over his shoulder again, but the other man is twisting out of the way of his leg—because he’s almost kicked Cloud—and so he doesn’t get to see Cloud’s face. He does see that Cloud isn’t looking at him anymore, but back at Barret who is still cursing out his walkie-talkie or the wire or something…anyway, the man doesn’t seem spooked.

And he has to get going. Zack crawls into the tunnel about a yard, then swallows his own curse as his head scrapes a low spot. He pauses and adjusts his positioning, then keeps going towards the lamp at the bend ahead of him.

When he gets there, he can see to his relief that the tunnel does in fact widen dramatically a little further out. Cissnei and Dyne aren’t visible at the other end, but he can hear them talking to each other. He pauses to tug at his gloves, which are riding up his hands a little, and looks back towards Cloud as he does, just to check on the man.

Cloud is crouched down at the very end, staring back at him. Zack startles, then hits his elbow against the rock and swears under his breath. He’s annoyed at himself because it’s not like he should have that reaction to the other man…but he looks again and Cloud’s in the same position. Motionless, one arm going out of sight because Zack assumes he’s steadying Zack’s sword, eyes glowing faintly in the dark as he looks at Zack, and something about how he looks is—

Zack pauses. Then jerks around to where his elbow has just gone against the tunnel wall, registering the faint feeling of air flowing past him, making that chilly spot. He didn’t hit the wall that hard, but now there’s a dent in it with cracks spreading out from the deepest part, and bits crumbling off when Zack fingers the dent. He pushes harder and feels the rock giving.

“Fair?” Cissnei calls, now close to her end of the tunnel. “What, you want to set up office in there?”

It’s not solid rock at all, but a thick layer of accumulated mineral deposits over what feels like a wooden board. “Got a breach—icing,” Zack says, digging harder at the flaking layer. “There’s air flow—stay there, I’m going to try and open it up.”

Cissnei doesn’t immediately reply, but a couple seconds later Dyne starts calling to Zack about gases and ventilation. Zack calls back that he knows but he’s already got a patch of wood exposed that’s as big as his hand, and he doesn’t stop scraping at it. He’s not smelling anything dangerous and his head isn’t swimming yet; besides, it’s not that long of a tunnel and if he has to, his SOLDIER enhancements should let him get close enough to one of the ends for someone else to drag him the rest of the way.

Dyne and Barret both say a few things from their respective ends, not all of which sound complimentary, but a second later the fans at either end of the tunnel—this one’s too narrow to put one actually inside—kick into higher gear so the air starts blowing in instead of out of the hole Zack’s making. It’s loud enough that Zack can’t really tell if there’s anything waiting on the other side of the board, so once he’s got enough of that exposed, he pulls out his utility knife and keeps that in one hand as he punches through the board with the other.

It splinters easily, and once the fragments stop falling, he’s got an opening big enough to get his head and shoulders through. The light spilling through from the lamp at his feet is enough to show him that there’s space less than a yard out for him to stand in, so after yelling that he’s going in, Zack does exactly that.

He finds himself in an off-shoot of another, larger tunnel that rapidly starts to slant downwards into the mountain. Zack can still walk upright, but he has to stick against the wall and twist his feet sideways to keep from sliding, so he goes back up to the hole he’s made, where Cissnei is now standing.

“Dyne and Barret are calling for people to get more supports, they’re still worrying about this caving in,” she says.

“I’m not gonna contradict the experts, but this looks kind of well-kept for that,” Zack says.

Because it does. Aside from the steep grade, this tunnel clearly was a planned one and its support beams are still visible. Not a lot of mineral accumulation on those compared to the board Zack had broken through…and the air doesn’t smell that stale. It all feels like somebody’s been using this one, and not that long ago.

“Did you—” Cissnei hisses, and then she shuts up even as she pulls her gun out and eases up next to Zack.

He nods. Yeah, he heard it too: a low moaning, unmistakably human. And now that he’s listening for it—now he can hear a heartbeat, and the periodic rasp of someone shifting across bare rock. Everything sounds like whoever it is, they’re not in good shape and Zack’s first instinct should be to go see how he can help, but…but he doesn’t.

Zack still has his knife in hand, and instead he tightens his grip on it as he tries to determine exactly where the sound is coming from. He can tell which direction they’ll need to go but the moaning doesn’t totally match up to the way the tunnel runs, so maybe that’s what’s giving him pause. Or maybe—

Maybe he’s just hearing things, the same way he was just seeing things in the hangar, the same way that Cissnei was just not seeing things. It’s not the kind of thought Zack usually has, but it sticks and the more he tries to shake it off, the more it seems to grow. He’s a SOLDIER and he’s here running an investigation to stop more people from getting hurt, so the idea of walking away just in case there’s nothing there is completely the opposite—he jerks his head, then his leg. He’s not running.

“Cover me,” he says to Cissnei.

She nods. She’d just been starting to give him an odd look, so it doesn’t seem like Zack was being a jackass for that long. It’d felt like he had—but never mind that.

He takes the flashlight off his belt and turns it on, then straps it to the wrist of his free hand as he starts down towards the moaning. The tunnel goes straight for about thirty yards, which is as far as he can make out with the flashlight. Since the steep slope means he has to go slow along one wall anyway, he starts shining the light around and about twenty yards out, he catches the edge of what looks like a doorway.

Not an intersecting tunnel, a doorway, with squared off corners and a hinge still hanging off one side. No door, no obvious traces of it left, but the moaning is clearly coming from somewhere in…Zack works up close enough to get the light over the threshold and gets the impression it’s a small, shallow room. He checks a few yards past the doorway, then quicksteps across the tunnel up to next to it.

Up the tunnel he hears Cissnei shifting so that she’s still got the right sightlines to cover him, and further back, Dyne calling at them for an update. Which pretty much ruins the element of surprise, if there was one—Zack grimaces and braces himself and then rolls around the doorway into the room.

He scans the entire space once, top to bottom, and doesn’t see anything even though he can still clearly hear the moans. They’re a lot softer and shorter, like whoever’s making them is falling unconscious, and now Zack is starting to think his hesitation might’ve cost—and in his frustration with himself, he zigzags the light beam by accident and it just catches on the crumpled form along the wall in such a way that he can actually see its outline. And then it moves.

“Got them,” Zack shouts over his shoulder. He’s sheathing his knife at the same time, then clicking a Cure Potion from his belt as he drops to one knee. “Medical—gonna need it, Cissnei,”

“Level?” she calls back crisply.

“Just—whatever they’ve got,” Zack snaps. He feels for a pulse, then grimaces as he realizes he’s feeling a forearm thrown across the neck and not the neck itself. “Whatever, okay, just—”

“Okay! Okay, got it,” Cissnei says. “Got it.”

“Got it,” Zack echoes. He finally feels to the right place, and then starts pushing at the person’s very long hair so he can try and give them some of the Cure Potion. “Okay, listen, we—”

This person’s been here so long that they’re covered in a grimy, greyish layer the exact same color as the rock, same as that board Zack had broken through. But somehow they’re still alive, and when they realize Zack is bending over them, they manage to twist around to look at him. Matted loops of hair slip away to show glowing red eyes—Zack stiffens, his hand yanking back on its own, and pulling the hair with it so more of the face is uncovered.

“Sephiroth?” he says.

Chapter 21: Present

Dyne gets into the tunnel with them to assess things, then squeezes right back through. Barret can’t fit and they are still worried about the entry tunnel collapsing—even more now that they know how much of a Swiss-cheese slice the rock here is—but they get a stretcher’s worth of medical supplies and someone with EMT training down to Sephiroth in commendably short time.

Sephiroth is conscious, and he’s aware enough to respond with yes-no head gestures, but he’s clearly in no shape to be interrogated about, well, everything. Once they get some of the mineral grime off of him, they can see that he’s covered with bite marks, in every stage from old scarring to barely free of scabbing, which alone tells Zack this is bad since SOLDIERs don’t scar short of a rocket explosion.

It also tells them that they really need to get out of here, and not just so that they can get Sephiroth to actual, proper medical care. But he’s too large for them to easily carry back the way that they came—his legs are hanging off the end of stretcher at the knees—so Dyne and Barret have a curse-storm back and forth over the walkie-talkies before Dyne excuses himself.

Zack assumes it’s so they don’t keep giving him looks for the language, but Dyne comes back a couple minutes later and explains that the tunnel they’re currently in eventually goes outside. Once they get out there, they’ll have to wait on a ledge, because there’s no good path up or down the mountainside, but Dyne says that Barret is already figuring out things from there, and outside sounds a hell of a lot better to Zack.

“If I could just ask a favor, Commander,” Dyne says once he’s issued directions to the EMT and a couple others who came in with the stretcher. He steps around Cissnei, who looks curious but who’s clearly going to stay with Sephiroth, and then walks Zack off a couple feet where he hands over his walkie-talkie. “Your, uh, second in command, he’s asking questions, and it’s probably better if you—”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Zack says. He tells the others to just keep working and not wait on him, then thumbs on the walkie-talkie as they start to lift the stretcher with Sephiroth off the ground. “Cloud?”

“Barret says you’re taking him out and then back to Corel,” Cloud says. “You sure?”

Zack had been about to say ‘yes’ but instead he coughs that back and stares at the walkie-talkie. Good thing he thought to dial down the volume, he thinks. “What the…he needs a doctor—a whole set of doctors, Cloud, he looks—I don’t know what they’re saying at your end but—”

“You sure?” Cloud says again. It sounds like him, the way he’ll quietly but insistently prod at Zack when he’s noticed something important—and he’s done that enough times, with enough ass-saving results, that Zack doesn’t immediately listen to the little niggle saying this also doesn’t sound right, coming from Cloud. “Look, I did hear—I heard Cissnei talking about how it looks like he’s been down here the whole time. But if that was true, he shouldn’t be able to even see. It’s been ten years in the dark. Even SOLDIER eyes don’t stay good that long.”

“I don’t know how you’d—I mean, fuck, look, if R&D actually has a study on that I’m going to fucking…” Zack exhales. He twists around, then realizes he’s actually alone in the room now. The rest of them are just outside, shuffling along with Sephiroth, but he—well, he definitely doesn’t think being down here is better than the hangar now. He gets himself outside and then starts trailing along behind the others, just far enough back so that they won’t hear how this conversation with Cloud is going. “Cloud. We’re not going to know any fucking more just staying put, and if any shit is going down, I still want to be outside.”

“Yeah, I know.” Cloud is silent for a moment. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Well, you’d better not be saying just leave him in here either,” Zack snaps without thinking.

Cloud doesn’t say anything.

Zack gives the walkie-talkie an incredulous look, and he might make some sort of noise too because Cissnei turns back to look at him. He ducks away from her gaze and slows down a little more. “Cloud? Are you seriously—is something wrong? What—”

“I have to go, Zack,” Cloud says. “If you can’t hear this, then never mind.”

Which is just all kinds of wrong, including the way that Zack actually is glad to thumb off the walkie-talkie and have an excuse to hurry up and hand it back to Dyne because otherwise he’ll probably throw it into the rock. What the hell, first ghosts and then Heidegger’s disappearing-appearing body and Zack’s sense of normality going and now Cloud’s just acting like a—what the hell.

Zack keeps on going, just thinking all he wants to do is try and get to somewhere that makes sense again, and he’s so wrapped up in that that he barely notices when the air freshens. He gets that people are calling to him, but doesn’t really pay attention to that, and so it’s more than a little bit of a smack in the face when suddenly, he’s outside.

He doesn’t walk off the ledge. It’s not that small, and the change in air is enough to at least make him stop and look up, even if he’s still not really registering the details for a good few minutes. And that is how a Shinra helicopter manages to get the drop on him, because literally, its blades are thump-thump-thumping bits of moss into his eyes when he notices it.

“Shit, Barret! You know how…” Zack hears Dyne shout from behind him.

The man’s voice is full of shock and admiration, but then abruptly dies off. Then Cissnei’s up at Zack’s shoulder, staring up at the chopper as Rufus Shinra pokes his head out to look at them.

What the hell.

Chapter 22: Past

Vincent’s face gradually comes into focus above Sephiroth, who…feels very strange, and who is aware of the strangeness in a clear but distinctly…unencumbered way. It’s very different from how he’s felt most of his life, he has to admit now that he has such a clean example to compare to: he has always had to shield his feelings or outright deny them any air, lest they betray a weakness to his enemies. Of course he’d told himself the skill to do so was an advantage, not only defensively but offensively; not being distracted with emotions meant he was free to spot his opponents’ own deficiencies.

But it had also been an intense, constant effort, and he hadn’t fully understood that up till now. Trying to not be human was exhausting.

The sense of warm, knowing humor, underlined with equally sad knowledge. Don’t deny yourself, my son. Not like I did.

And that makes Sephiroth jerk out of his daze, his mother’s voice and remembering she’s alive, and suddenly the miserable sensations of realities crash back in. He’s shivering, he’s aching all over and especially along his forearm and neck, there are pins and needles shooting up the backs of his legs and spine that—he heaves urgently at all of his limbs, and then gasps in relief when they respond. Sluggishly and with so little power that he can barely squeeze his fingers and toes together, but at least he’s not paralyzed.

Only extraordinarily weak, lying over what…appears to be Vincent’s lap. Outside of the cage. “Can you hear her?” Vincent asks, voice hoarse as if he hasn’t spoken in hours.

“She…your father. He—how long have we been here?” Sephiroth demands, with every bit of force he can put into it. He manages to swing up one hand, but then watches in helpless though growing fury as it merely comes to a limp rest against Vincent’s shoulder. “What—you—passive fool, did you—did you let him—”

“He’s wounded, he didn’t go that far. I heard him.” No, that’s not Vincent’s leg under Sephiroth, only rock. The other man shifts as he speaks so both of his knees press into Sephiroth’s side, then puts his hands on either side of Sephiroth’s head as he bends down to peer at Sephiroth’s face. His nostrils flare too, indicating he’s using his other senses—he’s trying to find something, some kind of sign. “Lucrecia. Can you still hear her? Did I—”

“What did you do?” Sephiroth snaps, as simultaneously he thinks: Mother?

He—does hear her. He can’t make her out, but he can tell that that murmur in the back of—he hears her in his head. She’s in his head, deep in it, but unlike that alien imposter Sephiroth has absolutely no sense of invasion, of any overwhelming desire to crush him. She’s…she’s present in an undeniable yet frustratingly intangible way, as he tries to zero in on that murmur only to have it die away…and then come back as he inhales in fear that he’s lost her entirely.

She’s a ghost even if she still lives, he thinks, and looks up at Vincent in time to see the man sagging in relief. And—Sephiroth frowns and searches his mind again. No, there’s no more of her than that slight presence in his mind, but at the same time there’s…something else. There’s another beside her. Also not trying to crush him out of his own mind, but still there and still clearly another. “What did you—why do I sense you now? Before I only heard—I could only tell—”

“You could tell when I wanted you to, or when I couldn’t help it or didn’t want to help it,” Vincent says. His words are clipped and almost cold, but his expression is far richer in signals, eyes darting all over Sephiroth’s face in intense study while his lips purse and twist. Human, fully human, even though there is that sense that more than a mere man is looking out of his eyes. “I stopped drinking but—my bite, Chaos’ bite, you reacted to it before and you did it again. Used the Cure Potion Father left but you were not—”

It hadn’t fully healed Sephiroth after Vincent’s first attack on him, and he gathers it was even less effective this time around from the way Vincent grimaces and glances away. He tries to sit up but is still too weak for that; his hand slips off Vincent’s shoulder, but with a growling effort, he’s able to move it up to his own neck. Which feels…smoother under his fingers, even though the flesh is tender and his trembling touch sends uncomfortably cold spasms down into his shoulder and chest.

But it’s not nearly as bad as the first time. That, and Sephiroth has some kind of connection to Vincent now, something that tells him that Chaos no longer considers him intrinsically antithetical but…confusing. And…his mouth is crusty, has half-dried crusts surrounding it that are far too thick if they haven’t been lying here for more than a few hours. “Did you—”

“I could hear her in your blood, but we could still taste her—taste Jenova.” Vincent pauses to collect himself. Oddly, he looks as if…he might actually now be considering Sephiroth’s opinion on this when deciding how to present things, and might not be assured it’ll be positive. “Not all of her comes out with the blood, but some does—and Chaos can deal with her then, Chaos can take that in and eliminate it. But you needed blood back or you—”

“You fed me,” Sephiroth says. He touches the smears around his mouth as Vincent slowly nods. “With…with yours. Not with what your father gave—”

“No. It’s drugged.” Vincent’s brows pinch in lack of comprehension. At first it’s merely at the question, but as the seconds tick on, the disbelief lingers and deepens and Vincent resumes his obsessive scanning of Sephiroth’s face.

Sephiroth exhales slowly. Then again, rubbing at his mouth as he thinks; now that he’s noticed the crusted blood, it feels disgusting and he has no newfound desire to take in any of it.

“Is there less of Jenova in me now?” he finally asks. When Vincent doesn’t immediately answer, only frowns, he can’t help an impatient, admittedly nervous sigh. “I don’t—I think she’s further off. She’s not trying to climb in and I don’t want to reach that far out, but I think—”

“Yes,” Vincent finally says. He pushes back as well, squatting briefly as he seems to debate what to do. Then he rakes the hair from his face before leaning forward again, this time to help Sephiroth into a sitting position. “Less of her, but still some. But what’s left is different. It’s mixed, Chaos and her.”

“And my mother,” Sephiroth grunts. He is painfully dizzy and immediately flops over onto Vincent, who receives him without protest, but he can tell he’s a little stronger. Hopefully that means his healing is beginning to take hold.

“And you. I still hear you. Better, too. I still can’t make her out but you’re clear,” Vincent tells him. The other man reaches around and comes up with one of the bottles of water, which he then puts to Sephiroth’s mouth for a couple welcome sips. “I know where Father went, but I can’t—I couldn’t go that far before. There’s a line of, in the ground there’s a line of the…what makes me start to change.”

“This entire place…it’s laced with that mineral my mother and he found, isn’t it?” Sephiroth mutters. He laps at the mouth of the bottle till Vincent tilts more water in, then makes himself move away from it. They still can’t sit idly here, even if Valentine is currently disabled. “He figured out enough to know where he could come and go but not you, but he’s not unaffected. It’s been mutating him too.”

“It wasn’t…as much as me, never was, and I…” Vincent sighs “…it was easier to sleep and not see it. I change a little anyway, no matter what we do, but not when I sleep.”

“More like stasis,” Sephiroth observes. He tests his limbs again, then can’t help a frustrated sound when his left foot spasms for several seconds. “I’m going to find my mother, Vincent. If you’re going to come, then you’re going to have to cross those lines. I can promise I’ll kill you, if you’d rather ask for that than staying here again.”

Vincent makes a low, amused noise as he puts the bottle down. When Sephiroth looks at him, the amusement seems to be genuine, and if anything, he looks more…personally interested than before, when, as intense as his focus on Sephiroth was, it was clearly motivated by what Sephiroth could tell him and not who Sephiroth was. “I can understand not forgiving my part in this,” he says.

“It’s not revenge,” Sephiroth says, feeling irrationally compelled to do so. He’s well aware that this entire situation, even without the additions of aliens and trauma-induced psychic senses, is skewing his emotional state. But he still wants to be clear with the other man. “I’m not your father or that damned alien, or anything anyone has ever tried to make me—the only one I’m glad to accept influences from is my mother. If you don’t think you can keep hold of yourself, I’ll give you that choice. You tried to do that for her.”

Silence. But Vincent is staring at Sephiroth again, in that near-inhumanly still way of his. This time Sephiroth can pin down some of that eeriness to how Vincent is—examining him with more than just sight; he can outright feel rather than merely suspect that now, and he does briefly think about closing off the extra sense. But like his mother, Vincent—or Chaos—doesn’t feel anything like that alien, and as long as the man isn’t trying to invade his mind, Sephiroth sees no reason to hide from him.

“I think I can hold onto myself,” Vincent says abruptly. His mouth tightens, but he shifts so that he can start levering Sephiroth off of himself. “It’ll still be a fight. You have to remind us—you’re clearer now than hearing myself sometimes.”

“I’ll…keep that in mind.” Sephiroth braces one hand against the ground, then gives his other arm to Vincent as he attempts to stand. He doesn’t quite make it before his head spins again, but he does manage to get his foot and one knee under himself.

“I never loved her.” Vincent is still holding onto him, but the other man is looking away, at the empty doorway. “I didn’t think clearly around her, for other reasons, and that was normally not a problem for me. So I confused things. And then Hojo shot me.”

It isn’t particularly clear if Vincent is expecting an answer or not, but Sephiroth needs two more tries to finally stand and that takes several minutes of cooperative grappling between them to achieve. Even then, it’s clear that they won’t immediately be moving from this spot, and…he decided to risk this when he jammed his wrist onto Vincent’s teeth. He hadn’t anticipated this exact result, but he had understood that if he survived, he would be doing it one way or another with Vincent.

He needs the other man. He needs Vincent because he’s in no condition to leave on his own, but also because Vincent has knowledge Sephiroth needs, and some of it likely isn’t shared by anyone else, even Valentine or Sephiroth’s mother. Chaos is an ally Sephiroth is going to need, since he doesn’t plan to stop at merely learning how to fend off Jenova. He is not leaving this place to merely hide himself somewhere else, and that means he’ll need to eliminate her sooner or later. So he needs Vincent, cooperative as well as committed.

That is the objective view. There’s a subjective one as well, that Vincent’s words are edging up to, and Sephiroth could pretend there isn’t, as he’s done for most of his life to date. He could also rail against it, wishing he could simply do without emotions at all, let alone ones originating out of dubious moral and ethical considerations. But that seems…ridiculous now, if he’s honest with himself. Especially if he’s honest with himself, leaning on Vincent as he desperately wills his spotty vision to clear, just starting to realize what else has changed about him but knowing he’ll have to quickly make terms with it. He’s human. He’s human despite everything that has been done to him and humans feel. And as his mother insisted in her notes, that is critical, and not something to fear.

“I’m not confused,” Sephiroth says. His voice thins out and he coughs roughly enough that Vincent has to re-steady him, arm going about his waist. So he turns and rests his very heavy head on the other man’s shoulder, and thinks that yes, despite some lingering resentment at Vincent’s earlier behavior, he does appreciate this. “I’m obviously compromised by fatigue, malnutrition, injury and unexpected mutagenic exposure, but I’m not confusing you with your father. I—I have an entirely different set of grievances with you. And—I’m clear that I asked you to get me out, and why. And how. I may rethink whether that was a good idea, but not that I had it in the first place.”

Vincent laughs lowly. He’s warmer than Sephiroth would have expected, considering the ambient temperature and lack of clothing, and seeming more and more personable by the second, even if it’s not always appealing. “No, you’re not confused, or confusing. Different from her—I felt sorry for her, and then I just wanted to kill her so she’d stop suffering. Not how we think about you.”

“Glad you appreciate my charms,” Sephiroth mutters. Then he inhales and concentrates, and shifts his weight back onto his own feet. His knees sway but hold, and he judges that in another minute or so, he should be able to walk. Barely. “Your father—how far is this?”

“Couple hundred yards. Minimum.” Vincent looks at the doorway. “The tunnel starts to go down, fast. This part was made by the miners, but then it runs into a natural cave system and they left most of that as-is. Ground’s not even.”

Sephiroth grimaces. He’ll be able to walk out of the room, but probably can’t stay on his feet the entire way, let alone think about engaging in any sort of combat. But all the same, he heard his mother—he can still sense her, but it’s very faint and that itself demands urgency, no matter that Valentine may have fallen short of wherever he’s hidden her. For all they know, she’s been similarly imprisoned and kept on some sort of suppressive drug cycle, and now she’s going to miss Valentine’s usual visit.

“Chaos is bigger than you, aren’t they?” he asks. “They’d have an easier time carrying me.”

Vincent looks sharply at him. For a moment Sephiroth thinks the man might actually let go of him, but then Vincent nods. “But they don’t generally come with more than four limbs. You’d still have to hold on in some way if you don’t want to keep me from defending us.”

“I’m starting to think that you and they weren’t that different to begin with, and that that’s part of why you had issues,” Sephiroth can’t help but observe. He twists to look about the room, noting that Vincent appears to have shot the hinges on the cell door and then wrenched it the rest of the way. “Get the blanket, we can belt me onto your back. You can do it in a way that you can cut free if you need to.”

The other man shuffles them over to the doorway so Sephiroth can hold onto that while Vincent retrieves the blanket from the cell. He also retrieves his father’s gun, which shouldn’t have any bullets now but still has active materia set in the handle, and hands that to Sephiroth while he remakes the blanket into a crude sling.

“If you use any of those, you’re risking a rockfall at minimum,” Vincent says of the materia. His tone is even and almost diffident, but not as if he believes Sephiroth would never take such a risk. “I don’t think my blood is pushing her out. I think it just…makes you feel less like her. Heals you a little, but just the flesh.”

Sephiroth nods as he checks the gun’s chamber out of habit. To his surprise, there’s a bullet left inside. Then he looks up slowly at Vincent, after thinking about it, because with Vincent’s Turk background, however distant it is now, he doubts the other man would have missed that.

Vincent’s shrug as he holds out the sling confirms his suspicions. “I don’t know if you can kill either of them with just that,” he says. “That one is a regular bullet. He wouldn’t have wasted one of the ones for me on a monster on his way out.”

“Well, I can’t say I won’t end up trying it out on him, but I’m not going after your father for revenge right now,” Sephiroth says. He eases off the wall and stumbles over to just behind Vincent, then slumps against Vincent’s back as the sling floats past his shoulders. The weight of the gun makes his arm slide down Vincent and he has to huff into Vincent’s hair with the effort of keeping that up. Still too useful to leave behind, but again, he’s unlikely to be aggressive in using it. “Can you hear your father?”

The sling is around Sephiroth now, but loosely enough that he could probably step out of it with only a little wriggling. It jumps as Vincent tugs at it, but then sags again as he lets go to spread his arms out to either side. His shoulders roll sharply, then repeat the motion with enough violence that Sephiroth instinctively slaps his hands against Vincent’s belly, the gun twisting against his palm as he traps it there.

Coarse, dense fur shoots up all around Vincent’s arms and then against his chest and stomach, with stiff enough tips that Sephiroth hisses at how it scratches him. It’s semi-diverting from the way Vincent’s musculature swells and broadens and reshapes itself into a form almost too bulky to squeeze through the doorway—and then they’re moving, and Sephiroth is far too busy clenching his teeth against the jolts to notice such nuisances.

Once they’re out in the tunnel, Vincent changes again, dropping onto all four legs as he assumes a form like a cross between the great southern felines and the feared dire wolves of Nibelheim. The sling is uncomfortably taut now, forcing Sephiroth to fight it for a full breath, but Vincent’s back is at least wide enough that he can bring his arms up to rest in front of himself. And his weight is off his legs, which means he needs less effort to simply stay conscious.

“No,” Vincent says, voice gravelly but surprisingly intelligible considering the current shape of his jaw. “Not like what you mean. Chaos doesn’t speak through him, just to me. And no—no Jenova. She has no hold on him. I don’t hear him, just them.”

Then Valentine has no excuse. Or so Sephiroth starts to think, but then something—there’s another thought that just flits from him, something contrary about Valentine right before his and Vincent’s fight. The way Valentine’s skin had changed, but also something Valentine or Vincent had said…he shakes his head. They’re losing time, and the time for theorizing is over.

Vincent seems to have similar thoughts, as without further ceremony, he suddenly leaps down the tunnel. Sephiroth hisses as the ceiling comes alarmingly close towards him, and then again as Vincent lands. He can feel how fluidly the muscles under him are absorbing the impact, but unfortunately that doesn’t keep him from also feeling the landing and for a moment it feels as if his teeth have been slammed back into the middle of his skull.

When he recovers, he slowly notices that Vincent has stopped well short of anything that looks…no, there’s a trail. A slightly darker streak along the rock wall, and then another one a little lower down, noticeable mainly because Vincent is sniffing at it; the lights end a few yards back and the shadows are starting to overtake them at this point. But Sephiroth doesn’t see a body, or anything besides more empty tunnel when he squints past Vincent’s head.

He does…feel something. A coldness that isn’t solely due to the physical environment, a chill that eats and claws into his shivering body and then gnaws further, until he realizes that it doesn’t mean only to whittle away at him but also to reshape…he snarls. Then fists his free hand in Vincent’s fur as he flexes all of his body, all of it, reminding himself as well as showing whatever it is that he can’t be duped into forgetting his own sense of who and what he is. This isn’t Jenova, this is something else, but it doesn’t matter. He is not going to let it change him.

Vincent is shying at whatever it is too, shaking his head and dropping it as if up against an invisible wall. “Is this—where it changes—” Sephiroth grunts.

This time he doesn’t think Vincent speaks aloud, at least not with tongue and mouth, though the words are clear enough. They seem to come up through his palms to rattle between his teeth, prying them apart from where they’re grazing the insides of his own cheek. Yes. We—I—see what used to be and we—we don’t want—

“Then don’t look for her,” Sephiroth grates out. He digs his nails into Vincent’s skin, feeling it tense almost to iron between the strands. More than iron, almost as if it’s changing—so he digs harder, intending to break his nails against the emerging plates if he has to because he’s not about to let Vincent close himself up again like a damned clam, not when they’re this close. “Don’t listen to anything else, don’t let anything—just find my mother.”

Vincent twists himself about in a circle, then staggers so that he nearly crushes one of Sephiroth’s legs against the wall. As it is, Sephiroth feels something pop in the knee and swallows his own pained cry, forgoing that in favor of willing the man—the man, he thinks, the man and not whatever might now be trying to take one or both of them over. No, not Jenova and not anyone else either, he won’t allow it. No.

Look, he thinks at Vincent. Look. I hear you, you damned—you can’t wrap yourself up in your corner because I can still hear you and I know you hear me and I’m going to keep telling you—

A spasm goes through Vincent. His massive head thrusts forward, shaking, as if he’s trying to roar, but no sounds emerge except for the scrape and ping of rocks shooting away from under his claws. Then he drops his head and arches his back and Sephiroth feels the ceiling come down on him even as he squeezes himself against—

Vincent stops. Doesn’t smash Sephiroth to paste against the rock, only lets it skate against Sephiroth’s back as the rest of the gasp bursts from Sephiroth’s lungs. And Vincent is still trembling, but less so now, and when he lurches forward, he does so unsteadily but still with a sense of conscious movement.

He takes a step, and then another. The ceiling recedes, only to bump sharply against Sephiroth’s buttock when Vincent stumbles up against the wall again. They’re making a drunken kind of progress down the dark hallway, but it’s still progress, and Sephiroth inhales and exhales and when he still isn’t crushed, he risks a look past Vincent’s head.

Nothing…but as Vincent swerves yet again, Sephiroth’s gaze jerks over a differently-colored patch of the darkness. And also, in his head: Se—

He snarls and slaps the gun against Vincent’s shoulder. Then grits his teeth, clutching desperately with knees and fingernails, as Vincent suddenly turns and jams his head through that barely-visible doorway.

The sling tears, starting from the bottom up so that Sephiroth’s legs and hips are flung free. He bounces involuntarily up along Vincent’s back, fingers dragging uselessly through fur as he slides over Vincent’s head and then down past it.

His landing is jarring. But…he twists and squirms for a few seconds, fighting back the flaring pain in various parts of his body as he struggles upright, and then he can see.

It’d been a hard impact but not a bone-breaking one: he hasn’t fallen as far as he should have. And now he feels—warm. The surface under him is warm, and very smooth, and much higher than the ground. And it’s starting to glow, a soft white light that spreads rapidly from where he’s lying like spilled water, flowing out to the edges of a large oblong shape before dropping down its…sides.

Sephiroth has landed on some sort of gigantic crystal. It looks like cloudy ice but isn’t that; he still has the gun and when he lifts that out of the way, he sees that its impact hadn’t so much as chipped the stuff. And the crystal’s shape is too regular—he twists around and sees the other end, and then looks down to squint at the blurry but unmistakable outline of the…coffin’s…contents.

At the same time, Vincent comes through the doorway. Back in human form and still clearly weakened, although he seems reasonably in control of his mind as he grabs Sephiroth’s end of the coffin for support. He’s looking not at it but at something on the floor next to it.

“Father,” he grunts. Then, with more urgency, realization quickly overtaking shock, his head dropping out of sight: “Father?”

Sephiroth, says Sephiroth’s mother, and Sephiroth ignores the byplay in favor of scrambling to where he can just make out her face through the crystal. Oh…I wished I’d see you, just once…

She…she…his words fail. He doesn’t have a conscious expression of how he feels, seeing her, except…except that she is his mother. He can see her, can feel her, and he has absolutely no doubt now.

Her eyes are closed, and her expression is calm. So are her thoughts against his, simply resting with him as he stares at her through the crystal, and so marvelous as this is, incredulous as he can’t help feeling, he’s also strangely calm. This is her, and finally, with no distractions or distortions, he can take her in.

But then he starts to see, as he memorizes everything—he starts to see the tips of dark, corrupted veining at her hairline, the gaunt way her cheekbones show up against the skin. And the way her throat flows into something misshapen, just before the crystal grows too hazy to make out more: the growths she’d mentioned in her last entries, the hideous things that had seemed like nascent limbs and that been starting to move on their own.

No…no…I’m poisoned still, she thinks to him. Release me and you release her…I fought as long as I could but she’s still in me…

Sephiroth snarls under his breath without thinking, pressing his palms against the crystal. His nails grind into it as he stares at the growths and imagines ripping them away like the noxious weeds they are, like the bars of the cage he was so recently trapped in. It isn’t fair or just, what was done to either of them, it isn’t fair for her to still be trapped like this with no recourse, with no one even knowing that she’s lingered on in the dark—he’d take her out if he could. He wants to take her out.

Something shifts around him, pulling at him, but he hunches against it and stubbornly clings to his hold. He can’t leave her now that he’s found her, and—

That shift again, not only outside but inside of him, and almost too late save that his mother also senses it. Her alarm is his alarm, her wish is his wish is her one desire now to save him as Jenova surges up in both of them, following his rage and his longing like a compass needle directly into his mind.

—yes free me free me FREE ME we shall be free and I shall take it all—

Sephiroth cries out and slaps his arm over the back of his head, driving his face down into the coffin. It’s only half-voluntary and he wrenches back enough control just in time to twist and take the brunt of the blow on the chin and the cheekbone, knocking himself dizzy but not unconscious, not easy prey for her. Then he heaves up onto his other arm, his body a dead disobedient weight as he works to pry himself away from the grasping, welcoming, waiting morass—he tries not to look as he does. He knows—

—but his eyes drag against the direction of his skull, rolling even as the muscles around them burn with the effort of resistance, and he does see, in that last moment before Vincent hauls him off the coffin. He sees her face in the crystal now, her eyes—her wide-open, ravenous green eyes, and he knows those eyes far too well. He can see those eyes in himself, in his own face, devouring all. Devouring him.

He never looks away, he’s quite certain of that. What saves him is the wash of red coming over and then drowning him in darkness.

Chapter 23: Past

This time Sephiroth comes to with Vincent’s thumb in his mouth. Blood is running out of the corners of his lips and something thin and ragged ripples against his tongue…he slowly realizes he’s nursing a torn part of the fleshy base of Vincent’s thumb, just as Vincent’s mouth lifts from a throbbing point cradled in his collarbone.

Sephiroth pushes out Vincent’s thumb with his tongue, then coughs wetly, blood and spit dribbling down the sides of his face. Vincent, now looking down on him, is considerably neater and only has a little reddish tinge to his lips that disappears with two quick licks. The other man does that in an absentminded fashion, his attention clearly on Sephiroth.

“She’s out,” he pronounces after another second.

“Not—without marks,” Sephiroth rasps. Hating that he has to say so, but at the same time unable to pretend that his mind isn’t freshly tattered from the fight. Or that this is no victory, only a skirmish in what will be a long, excruciating campaign.

Vincent tilts his head. Not in fear, or in doubt of Sephiroth’s words. He raises his hand, then lowers it to wipe at Sephiroth’s face. When Sephiroth grimaces and twists weakly in place, he moves his fingers to foster the motion, then to help Sephiroth turn to look beside them.

The crystal coffin is still there, and…yes, thicker, milkier, though the outline of its contents is still visible. And sprawled beside it, blinking heavily just as Sephiroth’s eyes fall on him, is Valentine.

Turned over onto his back, his torn clothing and the drying blood around it indicating that Vincent had partly rearranged him. But not to pull him away from Sephiroth’s mother’s prison and the reason for that is clear enough: Valentine’s arm appears to have fused with the crystal. Not merely hardened or mineralized, that becomes evident when Valentine inhales roughly and the crystal around his arm as well as the arm itself flexes with it.

“I’m…sorry,” the man says, and his voice comes not only from his throat but also from the mountain around them. There’s a similar inhuman depth to it as Chaos gives to Vincent, but it comes from a different source, something tells Sephiroth even before Valentine goes on. “I wanted—to stop it till—till I could save her, and Vincent, but—was wrong. I missed…that this isn’t—isn’t Chaos alone. There’s…these caves, they birthed Chaos and not only…”

“More than once. It happened more than once.” Vincent and whatever aspect of Chaos is currently speaking through him does not say this with pleasure. “Made more than one.”

Part of Sephiroth still wants to take Valentine and tear the man away from his mother, for his blindness and bad judgment, for his weak justifications and weaker acts of selfishness. But it’s obvious at this point that that is what Jenova feeds on, the anger…and also it will do less than nothing for Sephiroth’s mother or Sephiroth himself. And he still needs Valentine to explain a few things to him. “There’s some other actor here—a third with its own agenda. If Chaos was made, then someone did it and it wasn’t Jenova.”

“Yes.” The whites of Valentine’s eyes are green now, Sephiroth realizes with a jolt—but even as he stiffens, he somehow understands that this is not a sign of Jenova. It’s a paler green, lacking that unstoppable hunger. “Your mother—was tracing their work, not just Chaos. Looking for what they left but we were wrong and they weren’t—they’re still here, Sephiroth. But they’re…weak now. They’re angry but they’re too weak to come out anymore, they can’t…control what they made…I was looking for the way they…the veins here change constantly, it’s not natural, they did it and left some kind of—control—and I was looking…”

“Who, damn you—” Sephiroth rolls up onto one arm on sheer frustration alone and seizes Valentine’s free arm, hard and chilly as it is now “—you know you can’t do it, you know that so stop hoarding—”

Vincent growls and grabs Sephiroth’s shoulder, and when Sephiroth tries to shrug him off, claws sink into his skin. They raise only pinpricks of blood for now, but they could easily go deeper…and he cares less than he should, but he grudgingly stops short of taking Valentine by the throat.

“Tell me,” he says instead, staring into Valentine’s eyes. “Tell me where you left off so I can finish it. I can use it—I will find her, Jenova, and I will root her out. I will tear her out by the roots, I’ll make it so she never touches my m—but you have to tell me before you die—”

“He’s not dying,” Vincent says. Right at Sephiroth’s ear, and with so much fury in his voice that Sephiroth expects the claws to stab down any second. But…they don’t, and when he glances over, he sees all that fury directed at Valentine. Fury and grief and something that curls Vincent’s lips back from his sharpened canines even more harshly than the other two. “You’re not dying, Fath—you’re trying to join them. You’re letting them take you. You always let someone take you away—I’m the one who left but you always let go and never fight—”

Valentine flinches from the accusations. But at the same time he tries to lift his head towards his son. He can only do so a few inches and Sephiroth can see his hair has also taken on that mineralized quality and has grown into the rock. “…sorry, Vincent, I’m sor—but I can’t. I can’t fight. I’ve tried and failed, and I can’t even see what Lucr—find the rest of my files for him. Protomateria, Cetra, those files. I still use the same place. Give them to him because I can’t finish Luce’s work, I can’t…but they speak too, only it’s all—they don’t understand, they’ve lost and now all they do is scream. Lucrecia can’t get through that, they’re too aligned to Chaos but I—I can buffer them so she can speak to him. I can make it so she isn’t working to hold back Jenova and them. I can do that. They’re all I’ve been hearing for years now anyway.”

Go, my son, comes into Sephiroth’s mind. So quiet he almost misses it between Valentine’s increasing hoarseness and Vincent’s angry, wordless gnashing. Go now. I’ve seen you now and I can wait…I’m not alone now, I can…hold on so long as I know you…live…listen…Grimoire will stay and help but you must go…

“—never even asked me,” Vincent finally forces out. And as he does, he jerks himself back onto his knees. His face distorts into the beginnings of a muzzle, wide-open with readied fangs, and then he dives down at his father.

But Sephiroth can’t let him do that. His mother said Valentine would help, so he throws himself between the two of them, driving his shoulder into Vincent’s chest and squeezing his head down against his own but expecting the punctured skull anyway—

No. They roll over, and then Vincent thrashes free of Sephiroth none-too-gently, but his fangs never crush through Sephiroth’s head. Nor do his claws slash through Sephiroth’s gut, although they scatter scratches here and there on Sephiroth as the man abruptly twists the other way, his growling now mixed with harsh, shaking sobs.

Vincent is past the blind rage now. Sephiroth catches his breath, wiping at his face—fresh blood now, his own slicking over the dried traces of Vincent’s—and then looks back at the new crystal coffin slowly forming over Valentine. To hold him, so he can hold the voices in these caves back, keeping their transformative powers at bay long enough for Sephiroth and Vincent to leave.

I will wait for you, my son, his mother promises. Until you come again.

I will. I’ll come, and next time you’re coming with me. Sephiroth exhales, and then again, leaning on his trembling arms until they finally give out.

Surprisingly, Vincent’s arm shoots out and the other man catches him so he doesn’t fall against the coffins but against Vincent. And then Vincent stares at him for a long time, as he continues panting.

“We have to go,” Sephiroth finally mutters. “We can’t beat her from here, that’s the whole—”

“I know,” Vincent mutters back. He arches his shoulders and then moves his head back and forth as the bones in his neck pop, that thoughtless, feral fluidity quality returned. “I do remember. Where he’d keep things. I know where the files are.”

“Then get us to them.” Sephiroth twists towards the doorway, then slumps against Vincent in a fit of coughing. “Get me to them, and to somewhere I can recover, and I’ll make sure you remember where this is.”

Vincent starts to fold and tug at Sephiroth’s limbs, arranging them better for him to lift. “I have no problem with that—just make me remember why I left with you.”

Sephiroth nods. Then grunts an assent, as he musters up enough energy to not resist Vincent’s prodding and allow the other man to simply take on his weight. They’ve their own connection but that by itself means as much as Sephiroth’s connection to Jenova does; it’s up to him to give any meaning to it, up to him to decide whether to fight it or not.

So not this fight, he thinks as Vincent slings him over one shoulder. He lets himself twist a last time, his gaze skating back over the two glowing coffins and then staying on his mother’s as Vincent drags him away. He has better battles to pick.

Chapter 24: Present

So Rufus Shinra gives them a ride in his fortuitously-timed helicopter back to base camp, where they unload Sephiroth into a tent for medical, because no matter what Zack feels about the situation, a ride from Rufus Shinra is not to be turned down.

“I’m just updating Ang—General Hewley, per orders, because I’m scheduled to do so,” Zack says as he and Rufus are aggressively walked towards another tent by the Turks Rufus also unloaded from his chopper. “As part of my job.”

“I’m not here to tell you how to carry out your duties, Commander,” Rufus says while smoothly avoiding a muddy patch. He steps into the tent, then half-turns to gesture for Zack to go ahead of him. “This is a personal visit, so I also don’t fault you for not expecting me.”

Cissnei isn’t part of the portable Turk pack, and she’d looked just as wary as Zack had felt when Rufus had first asked for a “chat,” for the one second before her face had blanked out and she’d gone with Tseng—yes, Tseng is here—to Sephiroth’s tent. So Zack kind of believes Rufus, in that he believes this completely didn’t go through the usual channels. “So you just felt the urge to come over for a long weekend in the mountains?”

Once Zack ducks into the tent, the flap is snapped down behind him. He keeps himself from flinching but does turn to look, and just makes out the silhouettes of the other two Turks moving away in the direction of the medical tent. Zack hadn’t wanted to leave Sephiroth, who’d been going in and out of consciousness the entire, very short, flight over, and he immediately reaches for the flap.

“If I wanted to eliminate him, I wouldn’t have taken him back to a camp filled with locals, including two very well-known team leads,” Rufus says dryly. “The whole point of sending you out here to investigate was supposed to be preventing a revolt, not seeding for one.”

“We didn’t know he was here. We didn’t even know he was still alive,” Zack says after a moment. He’s making himself think past the kneejerk reaction to just clam up till Angeal gets back to him, or to make exit plans—it’s just him until Cloud and Barret get out of the mines and Rufus is right, there are too many civilians around for a fight.

Plus Sephiroth isn’t in good condition and whatever is going on with him, he was a SOLDIER when he went missing and so he’s still a SOLDIER. That’s something Angeal has drilled into him, that SOLDIER takes care of its own, so if Sephiroth has done something wrong, then it’ll be other SOLDIERs judging that and then meting out any penalties. They don’t leave that to the other departments when they can help it, ever.

“We didn’t know, but you just showed up like you knew,” he adds, turning around to look at Rufus. “And now you’re—”

“Again, if I wanted to seize him, I wouldn’t have taken him here,” Rufus says, still looking as if Zack is boring him. “And I knew where you were because Cissnei is just as dutiful about her updates to management as you are. Where’s Cloud?”

“Well, I—” Zack exhales to let out some of his growing frustration, only to cough as sudden confusion bubbles up too. “What?”

Rufus presses his lips together as something flickers underneath all the rich-boy tailoring. His eyes go up and down Zack in the iciest dip Zack has ever experienced, even compared to winter training around Icicle Village, and then he makes a movement as if he’s just going to stalk past Zack and go back outside. He does catch himself, but it’s probably the most unfiltered that Zack has ever seen him act. And that’s off.

“Cloud. Your assistant,” Rufus says sharply. “You all went in together, but he didn’t come out with you and Cissnei. Or did he—”

“Not that it’s really your business how I deploy people, but yeah, he’s here. He did go in, but he and Barret stayed back to keep an eye on the other end in case it fell in,” Zack says, frowning at Rufus. “Basic safety protocols. Also, if you’re here because he’s being accused of—”

Rufus’ face does that almost-flex into an expression again, only this time it gets close enough that a little impatient exhale spills out of him. “Did you check yet if he’s come out?”

“Why?” Zack asks.

“You complete idi—did Hewley keep you completely in the dark? He can’t be that stupid,” Rufus says, suddenly and fully emoting, entirely on the exasperation wavelength. Then he stops and stares at Zack. His expression shifts rapidly, then goes chilly again as he eases himself back into that casual slouch of his, pulls out his phone, and taps into it. “Fair, Cloud hasn’t been acting normally.”

“Okay, well, you’re entitled to your opinion as an exec, but all due respect, sir, I disa—”

“For—Fair, I’m not here as a damned VP, I’m here as the man who he’s been fucking for the last three months,” Rufus snaps. He’s looking at his phone, reading whatever reply he’s just gotten. Then his lips thin almost to nonexistent as he swipes out a curt answer and shoves his phone back into his pocket. “If you really think you’re his friend, you should listen to me. He came from Nibelheim. My father, in all of his infinitely shortsighted wisdom, decided to stick Hojo in that godforsaken place after everyone told him he wasn’t allowed to play with people anymore because they kept turning out homicidally insane, and then gave him a year. Do you have any idea what he did with that?”

“…I didn’t know Cloud was seeing you,” Zack says, blinking. Then he shakes his head, pressing his hand to the side of it. He—this is so fucking—he doesn’t know what to think.

Rufus looks at him for a few seconds, then makes an impatient noise. “Well, if this is where you say that’s absolutely impossible and I’m lying about your wonderful little SOLDIER, why would I lie?”

“Yeah, I mean—I know,” Zack says. Hating it, but because it’s true. There’s no reason for Rufus to claim to be in a relationship with Cloud, there’s no upside in it for him and tons of downside if there’s even a rumor that he has an actual personal life aside from siccing Dark Nation and the Turks on people. And there are…there were the calls, the messages, the ‘Restricted’ number, Zack thinking Cloud was seeing someone and Cloud not wanting to talk about it. And Cissnei—fuck, she know, Zack suddenly realizes. That’s why she was being so shifty around Cloud, that’s why she made that comment about fraternization. She knew and this whole time she thought Zack knew and was blowing her off. “You—so what the hell are you doing here, trying to do to h—”

“Ah, yes, blaming me for what I assure you was a pair of consensual adults. Well, I can actually work with that,” Rufus says, and true to his word, he relaxes. “I told him not to take this mission. He wasn’t supposed to take anything that might expose him to another rogue R&D project, I thought Hewley understood that.”

“He never got roped into anything in Nibelheim,” Zack says sharply. “We check for that as part of—look, we all knew about that much and he wouldn’t have gotten this far in SOLDIER if he had. Hollander’s treatments don’t work on anyone Hojo already enhanced, that’s why they had to start the whole program over.”

Rufus stares at Zack for a second, expression coldly unreadable. Then he turns and walks past Zack.

He’s nearly touching the tent flap when Zack grabs his arm and hauls him back. Then Zack jerks away his hand, a little shocked that he’d actually done that. He looks incredulously at his own hand, then back up at Rufus in time to—he thinks—catch the other man making another attempt to leave, so he side-steps to get in front of Rufus first.

Who gives Zack another cold once-over before lifting his arm the rest of the way and merely smoothing down his suit. “Did he come out of the mines yet, Fair?”

“Look, why are you—I don’t think you’re lying about seeing him, but I do think you’re not just here because you’re worried about him. That’d mean you actually have something besides antifreeze in your veins,” Zack snaps. He twitches back another inch when Rufus drops his arm, then grits his teeth at the man’s contemptuous look. “If you find him, what are you planning to do?”

“Well, first I’m going to check if it’s still him in there. If I have to make it as plain as possible—” Rufus bites off the word, then twists his head sideways; he doesn’t look troubled by his conscience or anything like that, but he does look genuinely frustrated, like this wasn’t part of some grand scheme “—I won’t pretend to be anything like what you’d prefer, Fair, but believe me, when I decided to start letting Cloud fuck me, I decided to let Cloud do it. You might believe R&D is good enough to tell when that is or isn’t the case, but I don’t.”

With that, Rufus takes a half-step back. Zack frowns helplessly at him, just—so damn confused at this point—and that’s when he notices the shadow outside the other end of the tent, behind Rufus. It’s a person in firing stance.

He twists and ducks, but the shot goes through the canvas and still catches him on the upper arm, just under his shoulderguard. It’s a dart, not a bullet—Zack rips it out of his arm, then belatedly dives for Rufus in an attempt to take him—but Rufus swings out of the way, then moves further from Zack as Zack collapses on the ground.

More shiny black shoes come in. Zack snarls and swipes at them, but he can tell the dart was loaded with…with the…the damn Turks…

“…unconscious, the EMTs don’t want to move him till they get more liquids in,” someone is saying overhead, ignoring his slurred growling. Their foot brushes his hand, then turns to pin it down as he sluggishly gropes at it. “Dyne says Barret is answering. Doesn’t seem worried but Strife’s not confirmed yet.”

“Which answers everything, of course,” Rufus says, and even through the growing haze Zack can pick out the sarcasm in the man’s voice. “Hewley is supposed to be the one with an actual sense—at this rate I’m going to need Rhapsodos back, and Wutai can go back to warring with itself.”

“Hewley’s not…” says another voice, that keeps on talking but that Zack can’t hear clearly because he’s being picked up by the wrists and ankles “…Rhapsodos says it’s been hours for him too…keep trying, but it doesn’t look—”

“Fuck.” Rufus is silent for a few seconds. Since everything else is fading too, Zack almost thinks he must have passed out, but then there’s one last, sharp bark. “Find him. Now.”

And then Zack is out.

Chapter 25: Present

When he comes to, Zack is…surprisingly unrestrained, considering he immediately recalls the entire lead-up including Rufus’ Turk squad slinging his drugged body like a potato sack. And finding Sephiroth, and the whole revelation that Rufus was the one on the other end of Cloud’s personal phone time, and…

“What I don’t understand is why he seems completely untouched. Look,” says Rufus, and even though Zack isn’t restrained, he does still feel like someone took all of his pre-SOLDIER hangovers and put them through a First training program before reintroducing them. Which is the only reason why Rufus survives standing in the same room with him, gesturing with disgust and disappointment at Zack. “He makes that same slackjawed face whenever you don’t immediately pull out your sword in a board meeting because it’s a board meeting.”

“You trying to remind me this isn’t a fucking board meeting?” Ang—Angeal says. Standing next to the cot Zack is lying on, looking like five kinds of hell but still here. And then he looks down at Zack and the way his face changes, it’s like Zack waking up is the worst thing to happen yet. “Shit—Zack, listen, I’m sorry.”

It’s just for a second. Then Angeal looks relieved, even though the guilt is still there, and his hand comes down onto Zack’s shoulder as solid as ever. But Zack saw it and now he can’t unsee it. And also he—Angeal knows—he shakes his head and rolls onto one arm, out from under Angeal’s hand. Things can’t just keep not making sense, they’ve got to—he’s got to make that stop, now. He needs to stop not knowing. “Cloud? Where is he?”

Rufus’ upper lip curls, but his eyes shutter rather than just staring coldly back. “He never came out. Mr. Wallace did, and said Cloud was right there with him and then dropped back to tie a shoelace or something equally ridiculous—since everyone on radio was so excited about finding Sephiroth, he rushed out to help and didn’t notice till a good ten minutes later that Cloud never caught up.”

“We can’t just go back in there after him,” Angeal says over Zack’s instant sharp inhale. His hand goes back to Zack’s shoulder and then stays there even when Zack stiffens—Angeal looks hurt about that, but also like it wasn’t actually an attempt to butter Zack up. He’s holding Zack back. “Look, there’s a lot you don’t know—a lot I kept from you. Those caves have something in them we didn’t know about, or I wouldn’t have sent you—”

Cue the disbelieving snort from Rufus. Angeal jerks around and though he doesn’t make a move towards Rufus, two Turks Zack hadn’t previously noticed suddenly swoop in to flank Rufus about a yard to either side. Rufus doesn’t flinch, but he waits a second before he arches his brow at Angeal and waves the Turks back.

“And I damn well didn’t know about Cloud,” Angeal snaps, still looking at Rufus. “That’s on you, not me.”

“Yes, it is,” Rufus agrees without so much as a blink of regret. “That said, I may not have been so eager to alter the health records for one of the few people to make Nibelheim slightly less miserable if I’d known your father was still playing around with Hojo’s work.”

Angeal’s hand comes off Zack’s shoulder and down in a fist against the edge of Zack’s cot. “I didn’t know,” Angeal says, ignoring how the Turks are reaching into their suits. “He swore—”

Rufus rolls his eyes. “Don’t tell me you took that at face value—”

“He swore and I checked,” Angeal finishes. Something in his face makes Rufus shed the contempt and look sharply at him; it’s probably the same something that makes Zack stay on the cot rather than leaping at the Turks, nerves jangling and insides getting icier by the second. “I checked. We checked…I figured out ways to tell, Shinra. That’s why I let Zack—” he briefly cuts himself off, but only to turn to face Zack with anguished eyes “—your enhancements are from my line, Zack. Hollander started up different cell lines for his take on SOLDIER and they don’t all have the same traits—Gen’s not the same line as me or you or Cloud. You’re from my line but a later version. A better one.”

Zack has a general idea of what goes into a SOLDIER—gene therapy, distilling down the best traits from the best they have, Angeal and Genesis—but has never even tried to understand the science behind it. Partly because he didn’t think he had to, when all he had to do was just look at Angeal and see who he wanted to be, but he can’t…he can’t keep pretending now. Not even for Angeal. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait, I thought—I thought it was just changing my genes. Like yours are the blueprint but it’s still my—”

“No. No, they actually put cells from him—” Rufus gestures at Angeal “—in you. Do I have to explain—”

“Right, well, then whose cells did they put in Cloud, since we’re talking about it?” Zack demands.

“Mine. They should’ve been mine, that’s the—Hollander stopped using Gen’s line after the Da Chao campaign,” Angeal says. At first he looks at Zack and he’s as firm as he always is, but then he switches abruptly to Rufus, and when he does his voice suddenly wavers. Zack doesn’t think it’s because Angeal isn’t sure about what he’s saying, but Angeal does seem unsure whether Rufus is going to believe him. “We weren’t taking any chances. On our side.”

“Da Chao—Cloud was…” After that, Zack starts to say, but then he stops because he remembers the Da Chao campaign had been the one where something had happened to Genesis and he’d had to spend over a week on sick leave once he’d come back. But not in the medical ward, and not in R&D despite all of Hollander’s complaints—Genesis had stayed with Angeal and Ifalna. “But—”

“Stop looking at me as if I was the one secretly changing the SOLDIER enhancement cocktail without telling anyone. I wasn’t.” Then Rufus turns his head and exhales. The Turks try to move in again, but he irritably jerks his hand and they move back. “Cloud is from Nibelheim, and that entire damned town is polluted with—we still don’t know where Hojo sourced all his mutagens, and that’s not all on me, Hewley. All I did was help him certify that he was below the thresholds for SOLDIER enrollment, and that wasn’t because you were going to send him back to the mountains if he wasn’t. He would’ve been shunted to R&D instead and forgive me for actually wanting to keep him out of their hands.”

Angeal jerks forward a half-step. “Well, if you’d said something we wouldn’t have flagged him for fucking officer enhancements! He—”

“But he should’ve screened out,” Zack breaks in. He shakes his head, then drops back against his cot, that cold feeling in his gut overtaking even his anger. Even Angeal working up to a rage next to him can’t keep him from seeing how it’s coming together. “He should’ve screened out. We know people from Nibelheim might’ve gotten exposed to some of what Hojo was messing with, faked paperwork won’t fix that—”

“It was just supposed to get him a desk job,” Rufus mutters, with what sounds like a fleeting hint of regret.

“—but if he passed the screens and the enhancements took—that shouldn’t have happened. That was the whole Da Chao failure—they tried to reverse-engineer SOLDIER but the mutations didn’t want to play with each other,” Zack goes on. He remembers the little bit he’d seen of Genesis during that phase, the way he’d been delivering crates of IV bags every other day to Ifalna. “Just ate up the flesh instead. But Cloud’s fine. He got his after that. He should be fine.”

“He’s not fine. He never came out of those damned mines, and before that he wasn’t acting like himself,” Rufus says sharply.

“And why didn’t you want him to go in?” Zack says. Then he turns to Angeal. “Why did you think I was fine to go?”

Angeal inhales as if the air is full of knives. But to his credit, he does answer the question. “Sephiroth didn’t just disappear here. We did think he was dead, Zack, otherwise I never would’ve—but it wasn’t just Hojo doing shoddy work. Hojo didn’t just use different mutagens, he started with a whole different cell line, and Hollander thought there was something in the mines here that specifically affected that line, made it degrade. Just that one, and that—none of that was supposed to be left, all of it was supposed to be destroyed.”

“They did try to investigate what happened, right after it happened. Even my father knew better than to take Heidegger at his word, and all he’d admit to is that he was too drunk to notice Sephiroth going AWOL,” Rufus says. He’s back to being slickly contemptuous, though for once it’s not in Zack or Angeal’s direction. “But the local R&D lead was gone too.”

“Grimoire Valentine,” Zack says.

Rufus nods. “He left a suicide note—it seemed unrelated and unfortunate timing, but that meant no new R&D lead could be sent out till Hollander took over. When he finally did and his new lead followed up on Heidegger’s shambles, my understanding was he said tests showed Sephiroth had probably just melted.”

For a moment Zack takes that in. There are so many things he could say—he hears Angeal shifting uncomfortably and can’t even look at the man. He can’t…he can’t think about that right now. He does need to know, but not because of that. Because what he does know, maybe the only thing he still knows, is that they’ve still got a missing man out there. Whatever the hell else has changed, he hasn’t, and he—he doesn’t leave people. Doesn’t leave them behind or in the dark or—he’s not leaving people, he’s not going to be like that.

“Well, that didn’t happen to me or Cloud,” he finally says. “Look, I felt a little weird but obviously I walked out of there.”

“And obviously, Sephiroth didn’t melt either. But he certainly isn’t the SOLDIER of record who went in there,” Rufus says in a measured tone, swinging back to face him. “So what did happen, Fair? Tell me you actually have something here—don’t tell me you’ve just been as much of a blind idiot as the rest. I’m damned well not leaving before I find out why, if I can’t find Cloud.”

Zack starts to reply, but then he can’t help looking at Angeal. Old habit, even with all the half-formed feelings and thoughts he’s trying not to give any attention to, because if he does he’ll be swallowed up and won’t be able to do anything useful. But the man was and still is his general, and when Zack needs to know what to do, Angeal is the one to tell him.

Angeal doesn’t do that. He does look back at Zack, but almost as if Zack checking in with him doesn’t…move the needle on where they need to go, the way Angeal feels about anything right now. Which includes guilt but thinking about that is a path Zack can’t go down, and anyway, what is meaningful for this purpose is that Angeal doesn’t say or do anything. He’s just looking at Zack to answer, same as Rufus.

“Yeah. We’ve found a couple things,” Zack says. He pauses and looks at the Turks, but then shrugs them off. Rufus is going to tell them what to do or not to do, so that’s not his problem either. “I know Cissnei updated you, but I’m just gonna say everything I have and you can say if she got that to you or not.”

“Acceptable,” Rufus says. “Start.”

* * *

This time, when Zack gives Rufus and Angeal the facts, he also gives them some of the subjective details he’d left out of his updates. He can tell Angeal notices and despite what he’s feeling towards the other man, does wish he’d handled that differently. But Angeal doesn’t seem to hold it against him and just asks a question or two.

Rufus asks a lot more, and it’s pretty clear pretty fast that Cloud not acting like himself has come up before. “Fair, I’m no paragon of virtue and quite confident that that’s better for my longevity, but I try to keep my hypocrisy limited to public relations,” Rufus says when Zack prods at that. “No, it didn’t bother me. He’s from Nibelheim, and if you’ve been there, you learn to expect a certain level of eccentricity. Anyway, Cloud never required me to send in a clean-up team or to arrange for a confidential settlement, which is far more than I can say about my fellow directors. Or about certain SOLDIER officers.”

“That only fucking comes up when some asshole decides to suck up to R&D by crossing me or Gen,” Angeal says, glowering at Rufus. “If they want to stop trying to kidnap Ifalna or Aerith—”

“—then you’ll stop dreading having to confront your father about it?” Rufus says without so much as flinching. He holds Angeal’s gaze till Angeal grimaces, then turns back to Zack. “This last time was different. He wasn’t just showing up in restricted areas without remembering how he got there, he was bypassing access restrictions to files and lying to me about it. That’s intentional. And while he can be surprisingly effective at sympathy ploys, he’s never been a tech whiz.”

“No, yeah—he does get all the cranky archivists to go the extra mile for him, but he’s not a Turk,” Zack says slowly. “But I was telling him—”

“I know what you were telling him to look up, and he’d put in those queries but also his own. And he was good enough at it that it took the Turks to notice,” Rufus says pointedly. “He was onto the Valentine angle well before you or Cissnei mentioned it.”

Zack exhales. “Okay, and I don’t know how that could happen, since like I told you, we didn’t hear about him till Eleanor mentioned her ghost story—”

“And this was after Cissnei told you about Heidegger,” Rufus says, leaning forward. “You’d told Cloud about that or no?”

“Why?” Zack says, cutting back his initial reaction to just answer.

“Because he was running searches for Valentine in Public Security databases,” Rufus says. He purses his lips for a moment. “That was something we didn’t immediately figure out because it was under Heidegger’s credentials.”

“When the guy was dead,” Zack says flatly, and then he has to grimace. “Wait—no, we still aren’t straight about—”

“Explain that part again,” Rufus says peremptorily. But then he does listen, right up till Zack goes into the strange stone chip they’d found in the storage compartment. Cissnei should have told Rufus about that one, Zack assumes, but Rufus immediately straightens up. “Where is it now?”

Angeal already has his phone out. “Hasn’t left Corel, I had it secured when I landed. You’re not looking at it without me, Shinra—”

“Despite the high probability that I’m less likely to have an adverse reaction to it? My test results before and after Nibelheim are the same,” Rufus says, and then raises his brows when Angeal looks angrily at him. “You and Hollander both claimed that that trap the Wutaians came up with was only damaging to Rhapsodos’ line, but I don’t think you tested that on yourself, did you?”

“Did you want to be down another general?” Angeal snaps. But then he visibly reins himself in. “No, but that…I wasn’t relying on Hollander for that. I have my own—”

Rufus sighs skeptically.

For a moment Zack thinks Angeal might punch the man. Instead Angeal explains, and looks as if he’s punched himself in the process of doing so. “Ifalna—if you lay a finger on her, I will end you, Shinra. She was married to Dr. Faremis and she had all of his work memorized. She…told me something from that that helps me out. His research overlapped with Hojo’s, that’s why Hojo had him killed.”

“I see,” Rufus says after a moment of narrow-eyed staring. It’s not a ringing endorsement, but Rufus clearly wants to move on now. “Fine. So long as I can see the damned thing for myself.”

Frankly Zack doesn’t understand what Angeal could’ve gotten from Faremis—who was never a geneticist so far as Zack’s heard, even if from what Aerith said, the guy did think the Cetra knew more about science than they got credit for—that would suddenly make Rufus drop his protests. And then the other two men start towards the door and he realizes neither of them are looking back at him. Also, the Turks have whipped out their guns and are pointing them at him.

“You’re not leaving here, Fair,” Rufus says without turning. “I’ll admit, you don’t seem to have changed at all, but I’d rather not take chances until I know what’s going on.”

Angeal does turn, but as he does, he also slides back out of Zack’s reach. “We’re coming right back,” he says. “But we need to look at this rock—I should’ve said I was coming in as soon as you reported it, Zack. And I want to make sure you’re safe while we look for Cloud.”

“You should’ve—” the amount of disbelief Zack feels right then just strangles him, and all he can do is sputter until suddenly, the anger burns enough of it away for him to shout. “You told me to come!”

But by then, Angeal has slipped out of the door, right after Rufus. The two Turks close in, still pointing their guns even as Zack shakes his head and drops heavily back onto the cot, thinking…sure, he could rush them. Just like he’s been going at this whole mission, just going forward no matter what, and not thinking.

He can’t just do that. He still wants to help, but he can’t just—he sits there, and watches the Turks back out of the room and close the door, and he can’t just do this. He can’t just sit here and keep on not knowing, not doing, but he doesn’t know what the hell he should do anymore, or who he should listen to.

Chapter 26: Present

The room Zack is in is somewhere back in Corel—it’s obviously part of a building too big for the outlying areas—but he’s not exactly sure where. It doesn’t look like the main office, and the room itself seems like it’s probably set up to provide some kind of medical care all of the time, though the cot looks like they might have just swapped that in for something like an examining table. It doesn’t have windows, but the walls are thin enough that he can hear people walking in the halls outside and take a guess at how big the floor is.

He does think about just busting through the door. Nothing in the room is strong enough to help out with that, not even the cot with its cheap frame, but the door also isn’t either and he could probably catch off-guard whoever they’ve posted outside with the right timing. Except that he has to wait at least a little while after Angeal and Rufus leave, and he has a hard time with that.

Zack gets up and paces around, then sits back down because pacing just seems to wind him up more and he doesn’t have anywhere to direct all that energy. But then he gets back up because sitting around doing nothing makes him angry, because it makes him think—

He stops and stares at the blank wall, and he’s thinking was he really that bad a friend that he never even noticed Cloud when something skitters across the floor behind him.

His phone. The door’s got a big enough gap between its bottom and the floor that it could fit through, and it’s still moving when Zack lunges over and scoops it up. Even as he does, he knows it’s not going to be secure, that anything he does with it is going to give the heads-up to somebody, but he goes for it anyway.

And then he twists to face the door as someone moves away from it on the other side. “Cissnei,” Zack says and they stop. “Look—”

“I can’t talk, Zack,” Cissnei hisses. “Just check your messages.”

“—I know, I just—Cloud—was he really—did he seem off to you?” Zack asks.

Cissnei exhales roughly enough to be heard. Someone else is out there with her, someone who shifts but doesn’t say anything. Probably not Tseng, and this is all just more Turk maneuvering anyway. But Zack thinks she can at least answer that.

“I didn’t really know him before this,” she finally says. Which makes him make a frustrated noise and slap the floor, so she quick-steps back. But then she comes up to the door again, ignoring the second Turk as they start to say something. “He’s still trying to—listen, I know but Fair’s still the same, I told—I’m still saying that, he’s still the same and I’ll—”

They both go silent. Zack listens closely and picks up a third heartbeat further down the hall. That’s Tseng, he bets, and the man must give the okay for Cissnei because then she taps the door.

“He’s still trying to message you,” she says. “Not anybody else, just you. Hewley gave the okay to track his signal but it’s not working.”

“So you want me to lure him back? To what?” Zack says. “Where does he go after?”

“…see, he guessed anyway,” Cissnei mutters to someone. Then she raises her voice again to address Zack. “People are going after him either way, Zack. Rufus doesn’t want him to go to R&D before we’ve got a better idea of what happened to him, but Hewley—”

“Sure, right, Shinra’s suddenly discovered a do-gooder streak,” Zack says. He glances down at his phone, but the screen is so crowded with notifications that after a couple swipes, he just unlocks it. “Tranq him and send him home, is that the line you’re feeding me?”

“Hewley authorized a shoot-on-sight,” Cissnei says, flat and quick. Then she lets out a little cough like there’s more coming, but nothing does.

Just as well, because Zack needs a second for just—for just—he doesn’t know, he thinks, and then he almost throws the phone into the wall because that’s all he fucking has right now and it’s driving him crazy. It’s driving him crazy that she says that about Angeal and even more, that he doesn’t immediately not believe her now. Because Angeal—Angeal could do something like—but Zack doesn’t want to believe that either, much as he—he can’t. He can’t not believe…

He looks down at his phone. Everything on it is in doubt, he tells himself. Everything, even these so-called messages from Cloud. And yet he unlocks the screen anyway, cursing softly as his fingers slip.

I’m fine. Don’t listen to them. It’s complicated and they don’t know everything.

I’m fine.

I had to leave but for a good reason. Don’t listen to them if they say something else.

You remember what she said? Don’t listen.

Aerith, right, Zack thinks. Not his first or most pressing thought, just hanging out there as he looks at the words and thinks they actually do sound kind of like Cloud, or at least like a person with a working, non-melted brain, and what that means and who it is or isn’t and all the million other thoughts he’s having right now. But that’s in there too, that she’d said that, and her mom’s apparently been helping Angeal with some kind of—Zack pauses. He frowns at the message, trying to figure out what’s wrong.

“Rufus at least doesn’t want him dead, Zack. I can’t speak to what else, that’s above m—I can’t. But I know you’re friends with him, and if you want at least a chance—” Cissnei is saying now. She sounds genuinely upset about something, but it can’t actually be because she wants Zack to get Cloud back alive and well and normal. She’s just carrying out her orders.

Just like he and Cloud were trying to, just like any SOLDIER would. And if Angeal put out a shoot-on-sight, Zack’s on that contact list. He hasn’t forgotten that everything could be fake but his thumb moves on its own, exiting the thread with Cloud and the first thing that pops up afterwards is the alert with Cloud’s name at the end. And even if it’s fake, seeing it—just—

He puts his free hand on the ground and breathes shallowly for a second.

“—ewley won’t tell us what the hell he means about he can tell who is and isn’t themselves, so we just have to go on what we have. And you’re the same guy, I actually put myself out there on that,” Cissnei goes on. “Hewley doesn’t want to take chances but Rufus actually believes me, Zack, so—”

“Why should I believe you?” Zack mutters. He’s still staring at the shoot-on-sight, feeling as if everything is…weirdly suspended, as if even the floor under his hand isn’t really there. He realizes this is shock and pushes himself up onto his knees, but can’t quite bring himself to shake out of it or do more to stop that. “You were fucking watching us, not just here for Heidegger. You were watching us. I fucking knew you—you were watching.”

He's talking low and not actually trying to make sure Cissnei hears him—it just needs to get out of him—so when she actually answers, it makes him start and lose his balance enough to have to smack the floor again. “That’s my job, Zack,” Cissnei says, but the way she says it, it’s almost as if she’s angry at it, at herself. “You always knew that. And you weren’t telling everything either.”

“I didn’t know about Cloud and Ru—”

“Well, what, was I gonna fill you in about that? You would’ve laughed in my face, right after you told Cloud to stay away from me,” Cissnei says sharply. Then she inhales loudly enough to be heard through the door. “Look, believe me or not, you can check your phone. It can still send messages. And Cloud can read them. We can too, but if he can read them and he’s still…nobody knows where he is. He can still do what he wants with them. Think about that—I know he really is your friend, if nothing else. I did watch you, Zack, that’s what I told R—think, okay?”

Zack exhales himself. Puts his hand to the side of his head, then back down on the floor as he mindlessly scrolls up and down his inbox with his other thumb. He can see the inbox refreshing so it’s connected to the network and Cissnei is right about that. And she was…right about thinking Cloud was…but he doesn’t want to think that, he even jerks his head to the side as if the thought’s a slap from outside rather than a dagger within.

He doesn’t know, he thinks desperately. He doesn’t know anything, and everything he’d thought…

The lights go out. Cissnei shuts up immediately and Zack hears her footsteps and those of the other Turks instantly rearranging themselves in the hall. Then they all go still for ten seconds, twenty seconds. Thirty.

One Turk moves out while two others cover them. They work their way down the hall, with the last one still within sight range of Zack’s door. The silence goes wire-tight with tension and something tells Zack to slide slowly backwards, moving to where someone coming into the room can’t directly land a first blow.

Something booms distantly from underneath—from a lower floor. Then the Turks are running, all three of them, and Zack just catches the swing-slam of a door. They’re taking the stairs rather than any elevator, he thinks, and then his door opens.

At the same time, he realizes what was wrong with Cloud’s message: he never told Cloud about Aerith’s warning.

“I’m Sephiroth,” says Sephiroth. Standing in the doorway, clearly dressed in whatever he could find in the scrubs supply closet but also clearly not near-comatose. He’s still so pale that the light coming off Zack’s phone screen makes him look like a stone statue rather than a person, and those scars are visible, but somehow he looks much healthier. He definitely looks like he’s fully capable of using the sword in his hand. “Who are you? You really can’t hear her at all, can you?”

“Zack,” Zack says as he rolls up onto his feet. He steps back towards the cot as Sephiroth makes to come in, and then takes another step even when the other man, an amused smile on his face, stops. The cot isn’t going to last more than the first swing, but he’s at least going to try for that much. “Her? Who’s her?”

“Jenova—she took over the mind of the other—the other one of you, the one everyone else now seems to be after,” Sephiroth says. He moves back from the doorway, then turns as if he’s actually going to walk off. “He’s going to figure out shortly that what she wants isn’t in the mines, if he hasn’t already, and then he’ll probably come back here.”

“Where what, you’re third in line to take him down?” Zack snaps. He stoops down and grabs the leg of the cot, then gives it an experimental twist to see how fast it’s going to come apart.

Sephiroth pauses and looks back at Zack. “If she tries to kill me, I will defend myself, and that may be fatal to him,” he says, not looking particularly bothered but not as if he’s relishing the idea either. “Or it may not. But my sparing him won’t actually free him from her control, you need to realize.”

“I need to—I don’t even know what you mean, Jenova and taking over minds,” Zack can’t help sputtering. “But you know what? We came over here because people were dying and saying your name, and we were gonna stop that—”

“Stop it?” Sephiroth says incredulously. “They were sent here after me, the same way that Heidegger and your comrade—”

“Nobody sent Cloud! I brought him!” Zack shouts.

His voice cracks. Because it’s a lie, because he knows it’s a lie even as he says it, he knows it wasn’t just him but also Angeal and the rest of Shinra’s leadership. But also because it’s not a lie, but the truth: he did bring Cloud. He was told to do it, but also he did it, and because he did it, all of this has happened. And he can’t understand.

The lights go back on, but Zack takes several seconds to realize it. When he does, he starts and then looks up, fully expecting there to only be an empty doorway. He starts again because Sephiroth is still there.

Frowning at him. Then, casually but with clear purpose, Sephiroth pivots around. He gestures at Zack to come out of the room as he does, then starts to walk away in the opposite direction that the Turks had gone. “I didn’t come here for this Cloud, and the rest of you aren’t influenced by her yet. You haven’t done a damn thing to stop her either, but that is for another time,” comes back from him.

Zack inhales, then looks at the cot. Then he shoves himself up and towards the door, jamming his phone into his pocket as he does. In a second he’s out into the hall, and in two he’s caught up to Sephiroth, who moves closer to the wall but who doesn’t bother to even look over his shoulder at Zack.

“What did you come for? That rock we found in the plane that made me see you? How the hell did that get you in there to kill Heidegger?” Zack demands.

Sephiroth stops. Then whips around, far less blasé this time about it so it’s a good thing Zack was already watching the man’s sword. That doesn’t come out but Sephiroth’s grip is ready to make that happen. “What rock? And what do you mean, kill Heidegger?”

“I mean he was slashed up just like the others—and did you kill those other—”

“If you looked at those bodies, you’d know the answer to that is not straight—” Sephiroth pauses and listens to something. Then presses his lips together. “Also I have no desire to meet with General Hewley right now. She might not be in him, but I’m not about to assume he’ll be any more aligned against her than Shinra overall is.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re not going looking for Cloud’s head right now, I think I can tell you a few things. And I don’t give a shit about Shinra right now, I just want to know what the hell happened here and to get to my—my friend,” Zack says. Part of him says this is a bad idea, but honestly, most of him thinks that nothing he’s taken as a good idea to date has turned out that way, so he might as well start trying the opposite. And if nothing else, Sephiroth might be able to give Zack answers that Angeal and Rufus haven’t—at least he’s not drugging Zack or pulling weapons on him to avoid doing that, anyway. “If Cloud comes after you, then let me have first crack at him. That’s all I want in return. I—I know him better anyway, I taught him his moves. I might be able to get him to stop.”

Sephiroth considers this. There’s a…weird feeling that passes over Zack, a kind of tingle except it’s completely inside his head, not across his skin, and somehow he gets the impression that Sephiroth just checked something.

“This way,” Sephiroth says.

He turns and goes down the hall to the next door, which he unceremoniously kicks in. Then he walks into the room, almost not breaking his stride, and crosses it as Zack reaches the doorway. This room has windows and Sephiroth pulls one open and just jumps out of it like he—well, he obviously already knew where he was going to land. Zack has no fucking idea, but he’s not turning back now. So he goes to the window too and jumps.

Chapter 27: Past

It’s night when Sephiroth and Vincent find their way out of the mines. Vincent carries Sephiroth most of the way, though once or twice they come across a place where Vincent balks roughly enough that Sephiroth has to let go of him and lean against the wall, cajoling and willing Vincent back to controlling himself.

“Better than before—the mines aren’t the same,” Vincent mutters at one point, and it is true that his attempted transformations at those times aren’t nearly as dramatic.

He still looks visibly exhausted by the ordeal, and between them, they’re barely able to drag themselves to a nearby rude shack, which apparently is a hunting blind of Valentine’s. The man also seems to have used it as a holding point for his trips into the mine, because despite its crudeness, it’s well-stocked with water, a camping stove, and prepared foods. There’s also a sleeping bag, which Sephiroth unrolls with trembling fingers about a minute before his body gives out and he collapses.

Vincent stays up a little longer, setting up the stove, and when Sephiroth wakes a couple hours later, the man has made up a meal. It’s stone-cold now but Sephiroth is so ravenous he swipes his finger around the tin for the last drops.

Then he looks at Vincent. “Is blood all you eat?”

“Mostly. But mostly I wasn’t moving. I slept,” Vincent replies. He hasn’t squeezed onto the sleeping bag, even though there’s a small portion sticking out beyond Sephiroth. Instead he’s sitting on the bare floor, facing the doorway. “I…think I’ll need proteins. I can kill something on the way. I think I need it raw.”

“Noted,” Sephiroth says, but then frowns. “On the way to where? Back to town? If so, we need to think about Heidegger—he’s probably nervous enough now to have sent out a search party.”

Vincent shakes his head. His eyes drift from Sephiroth’s eyes to Sephiroth’s neck, but then drag back. “No, Father had another place. Even before Hojo tried to kill him, he knew better than to keep all of his research in the official files. After that, Lucrecia and then I moved more of his papers there, and that would be where I’d start looking now.”

Sephiroth remembers what the supplies had looked like before he’d passed out, and can deduce that Vincent hasn’t even touched the water. He sucks his finger clean, then picks up the bottle Vincent left out for him; Vincent’s gaze tracks both motions but then, once again, goes to his throat. “You need the blood for sustenance, or so Chaos can drain a little more of the Jenova from me?”

“Probably both. I haven’t been experimenting,” Vincent says. Despite his dry tone, his eyes are pinned to Sephiroth’s pulse. “I wasn’t thinking about making it better for you before.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that you’d think about that now,” Sephiroth says. He takes a last drink of the water, then sets the bottle down and looks fully at the other man. “For the record I’d find either of those explanations acceptable. Let’s not pretend that window dressing does anything, or that I need it to cooperate with you.”

“I wasn’t,” Vincent says with a shrug. “I just think it’d be more efficient if it wasn’t a fight. My father’s place is ten miles from here and I only found one Cure Potion.”

“Fair point,” Sephiroth says. He’s admittedly a little offhanded about it, though it’s because he’s considering how often Vincent may need to take his blood versus what his healing cycle might be like on a sufficient diet and outside of a cage.

It still isn’t quite enough to make him detached when Vincent’s hand drops to his arm and then Vincent twists so that suddenly the other man is over him. Sephiroth stiffens, a long inhale whistling past his teeth, but…his instincts are different now too. He doesn’t immediately move his arms into Vincent’s way, though his hands tighten on his thighs.

Unexpectedly, Vincent doesn’t descend on him right away. Only leans over, his mouth about the level of Sephiroth’s eyes as he brings up his other hand to take hold of Sephiroth’s other arm. Sephiroth flexes a little in the man’s grip and Vincent cocks his head, but doesn’t force Sephiroth’s arms back against the wall. Then Vincent frowns, tilting his head further and peering at Sephiroth—at the scarring, that’s what he’s examining.

“It’s better but I still don’t…” Vincent shifts so that he’s leaning over the opposite side of Sephiroth’s neck “…I can do this cleaner when you’re not fighting.”

“I’m not,” Sephiroth points out. And then puts his head back against the wall so that his hair slides out of the way.

He’d meant that as much as a taunt as consent, he’ll admit. Since this is necessary, he doesn’t want to dance around it, or try and clothe it in ridiculous illusions for the sake of making it palatable; Sephiroth has never had the luxury of that type of self-delusion, and anyway, has no taste for it. But something in him undeniably stirs when Vincent’s pupils dilate at the motion, something not fear or rage but strange and twisting and entirely—unnecessary, he thinks, unnecessary but yes, better.

Vincent’s lips twitch, and Sephiroth does read a little savoring in that. But they don’t curl back to show the canines; Vincent simply bends over and puffs at Sephiroth’s skin, and when Sephiroth flinches in irritation at the fake-out, the man sinks in his teeth.

Sephiroth shudders back against the wall. His fingers slip laxly across the sleeping bag, and then, with an effort, he clenches them. The pain is there, but much more—window dressing crosses Sephiroth’s mind and he can’t help a twist at that, irritated and amused with himself. The bite isn’t nearly as piercing as his own self-castigation, anyway. That and it’s—warmer. Softer after the first second, softer and he can feel past the points of Vincent’s teeth to something that presses and probes inquisitively at his torn flesh as he shifts—to lips and tongue that tease not only at the bitten spot but also, somehow, throughout his body.

He's warming all over from it. And then he realizes not all of that is himself and that some is pass-through from Vincent, Vincent-Chaos who has never been this warm, never craved this warmth, because back when he was only Chaos it wasn’t necessary—but it is now, Sephiroth thinks as he digs in with his fingers again, feeling the way the sleeping bag bunches suggestively between them. Feeling the part of this that is him, and that thinks since it is necessary now, since they can’t disentangle themselves then they might as well join on their own terms and see after that who can divide them, bizarre mineral or power-hungry alien—

And then it’s very, very, very cold. Cold enough to burn, to lance through Sephiroth from neck to groin, and then splinter into grasping claws that shiver his thighs as he jerks and claps them instinctively together. Since Vincent is no longer there to block their way, but pulled back to one side, long black tongue erasing the last red color from his lips.

He pushes Sephiroth back by the shoulder when Sephiroth moves towards him, but then hangs over Sephiroth, close enough that no preternatural senses are needed to pick up the catch in his breath. “No more,” he grunts. “Enough. If I hunt I can’t carry you.”

Sephiroth grimaces and the selfish, irrational part of him drops low. Not gone, but well below the other priorities of basic survival, finding Valentine’s work, fending off Shinra—because he won’t be rejoining them. He’s already decided that much; there will be no more bowing and scraping for merely comfortable bonds. He’d thought Hojo had shown him how little he could have, but Jenova has blown that entirely away, and in that kind of war mediocrity is no refuge.

So there are other priorities, and this one he pushes low, till they have time, and then nods.

Vincent studies him for a second, then turns and reaches for something. The man comes back with the lone Cure Potion, which he uncaps but then helps Sephiroth to cradle in both hands. Sephiroth lifts it on his own, grimacing again at the renewed trembling in his fingers, and the Potion is just crossing his lips when he feels Vincent touching the side of his neck.

He slows his drinking but doesn’t stop. Vincent’s expression is mostly visible past the bottle, brow furrowed and eyes focused but giving off a slightly detached air. It’s almost as if the man is only curious, as his fingertip gingerly traces over the healing skin. The bite has knitted but is still tender, and as Sephiroth flexes his shoulder up, Vincent pulls back his finger. Then abruptly curls it, the edge of one nail scraping across the fresh skin in a way that makes Sephiroth pull the bottle back enough to hiss.

Vincent’s mouth purses as if he hadn’t meant to elicit that. He glances at Sephiroth and when Sephiroth shrugs and resumes drinking the Potion, Vincent sits back. Lifts the hand he’d been using to his mouth and laps off a smear of blood—what he’d wiped from Sephiroth’s throat—before suddenly but smoothly rotating his finger so that one canine cuts into it.

Then he holds his bleeding finger out towards Sephiroth. “Too much might make you—I think you were fighting yourself, the first time I did this,” Vincent says. “Trying to make what’s left of Jenova not…making yourself change to make it all settle. Not sure how much you can do that outside.”

“We’ll come back for samples and see how much of its power it keeps outside of the mines. I’d be surprised if your father wasn’t doing that,” Sephiroth says, but he’s staring at the bloody finger. He doesn’t think he craves it, he’s certainly still thinking through the assumptions versus the facts they have, but…he does have that feeling again, the one that says this won’t be worse. “But I think a little might actually…”

Vincent is holding his hand near the bottle. Sephiroth could simply lift that and collect the blood on the rim, but…window dressing, he thinks disdainfully, and instead leans over to close his mouth around the finger.

He doesn’t linger, only sucks the blood off and then leans back. It’s still enough time for Vincent’s pupils to change size twice. Then Vincent abruptly turns away, slithering across the small space and cracking open the door to peer outside. He doesn’t appear to do that merely to remove himself, because when Sephiroth finishes the Potion a second later and starts to move, he raises a hand to signal not to.

A couple minutes later, he signals again that it’s safe to do so. “Two. Plus a dog.”

“Searchers?” Sephiroth asks.

“Probably not, they weren’t running a pattern. But there’s a—I think there was a path, a shortcut some of the miners use to get from the eastern side to the southeast,” Vincent says. “We can go now.”

They’ll have to think about that too, the locals—Sephiroth has a very difficult time believing that Valentine had been operating completely on his own. But he pushes that aside for later. They have other priorities.

It takes them the entire rest of the night to creep across the mountainside and reach Valentine’s hunting lodge. The place is incrementally better than the blind: three rooms, well-water and a generator Vincent fires up so that they can use the bathroom taps but a fireplace that he leaves unlit till he can go out and inspect the perimeter. He doesn’t think it’s located near any of the well-traveled trails but admits that his knowledge is dated.

He also needs to eat, as despite his statements, he hadn’t left Sephiroth at any point during the trip over to do that and both of them are starting to realize his hunger is detrimental to Sephiroth’s concentration as well. So he leaves to take care of that, and after a haphazard but thorough scrubbing and a hasty dip into the food stores, Sephiroth crawls onto the one bed and sleeps.

There…is not a dream, per se, but he wakes with the impression that his mother is painfully glad of his safe arrival. Painfully being the key, as it’s what makes him look up around himself and realize he’s surrounded by boxes of papers.

When Vincent returns, Sephiroth has worked his way through two of them and has a handful of what look like the originals of his mother’s notes. He’d already been thinking about when they can return to the mines for a number of reasons and one of them had been that he’d had to leave everything of her behind—he’d finally found her and just as quickly, had had to lose her. But these…

They’re not her. And he’s well aware of the environment in which he’s found them, and still resents that his discovery and reunion with her had to be mediated through someone as flawed and self-blind as Valentine. But they’re still her notes.

Vincent crouches in the doorway, but although Sephiroth looks over several times, the man never says anything. Sephiroth eventually returns to the boxes, dumping them out and sorting them into priority piles for review, or at least trying to. Whenever he glimpses something that looks like his mother’s handwriting, or that looks like materials she likely produced, he can’t help but stop and read that right away.

He keeps at it till he falls asleep on the floor in the middle of them. When he wakes, there’s an opened, reheated but now cold premade meal in the doorway along with a bottle of water. Vincent is elsewhere in the house and doesn’t come when Sephiroth bangs his knee on a box reaching for the food, so Sephiroth eats and then goes back to his work.

They pass a couple days in that fashion, with almost no words exchanged. Sephiroth does gradually start to notice that Vincent is a little different with each appearance: standing rather than squatting, wearing more and more clothing. Sometimes he can smell fresh blood on the man, and pieces of game meat—cooked for him—will appear with the camp rations, but Vincent doesn’t provide explanations, or make demands for reciprocal contributions from Sephiroth. Most of time too, their newfound link is surprisingly easy to let drift from the center of his attention, but sometimes he…can feel, he thinks he’d call it feeling…Vincent struggling with Chaos, like a sudden riffle on the edges of his mind.

That is one of the few things that will break his concentration, but whenever Sephiroth goes looking for the man, Vincent is usually not anywhere close to the building and Sephiroth doesn’t care to go outside yet. Besides, the riffle always subsides quickly, and then Vincent appears no more than a couple hours later, with little to offer to any inquiries besides a noncommittal grunt.

It’s hardly peaceful. Sephiroth has worked out the broad outlines of the lies his life has been built on, but there are plenty of spaces for the materials Valentine has accumulated to paint in damning details. There are times when Sephiroth can’t stop reading, even as his hands shake with rage, and times when Sephiroth crawls to the bathroom and shivers uncontrollably before the unheated water even touches him. And in all of that time, irrational as it is, he refuses to look at himself in the lone mirror in the bathroom.

But you’re still my son, his mother whispers to him in his sleep, and when he twists and strains for her, he goes too far and Jenova springs out at him, tries to catch him in his depths and he wakes snarling, nails already bloodied from bashing into the metal frame of the bed when he rolls out of it onto the floor.

Sephiroth comes to himself, slowing his panting breath and then stopping his hand just before his bloody fingertips would have smeared onto his hair. He tosses his head instead to clear his eyes, then sits back and looks at the papers. There are still more to read through, and he’ll get to them—he needs to know it all, he can no longer ignore anything—but right now he needs to think.

And to acknowledge. He goes into the bathroom and deliberately faces the mirror as soon as he’s inside.

Still his face, still him looking out, but his eyes are red now, and the scarring on his neck and forearm has faded in color but when he washes off his hand and feels at himself, the tissue ribs up under his fingers. And he’s always been pale but previously, ‘corpse’ would have been a deliberate insult. Now, he…still would take offense but has to admit it’d be on grounds of pride alone.

But despite all of that, he thinks he looks better than he did. Yes, his hair is tangled and when the blood comes off his fingers under the faucet, ink-stains remain, and he’s no longer the picture-perfect soldier model. But that soldier was almost dead inside, with no real sense of direction and only the last vestiges of an understanding that some other life was possible—he can see that now, because he sees who he is now.

“I can still fight,” he mutters to his reflection. He knows that too. His muscle mass is down, though not as severely as he’d feared, and though he’s full of cramps and aches, he feels improved enough that resuming workouts should—

He turns. Vincent looks back at him from where the man has been sitting all this time, quiet and observant, in the shower. A crumpled, bloodstained wad of fabric is in front of Vincent as if he’d torn that off just before Sephiroth had walked in, and his shirtless torso has drying swatches of blood all down one side that don’t smell like his. Or like an animal.

“Are they looking for me?” Sephiroth asks instinctively. Then grimaces as he twists to fully face Vincent; he’s still a fighter, still trained for that, and while the way the rust cracks off his thoughts is almost physical, he does start thinking about their strategy, about the fact that they need one. “How long has it—”

“There are search parties now. Just locals, and most of them don’t want to work on this. Would rather be in the mines, but I think Heidegger is—pushing off another team from Midgar coming out.” Vincent speaks slowly, but not out of apparent fatigue or other physical weakness. He certainly doesn’t look injured, despite the mess. “He’s paying. Some out-of-town hunter—not Midgar, just further out.”

They were the donor, per Vincent’s gesture at the bloodstains. “Dead?” Sephiroth asks to be certain. “With or without coming back?”

“Without, but they’ll have missed a check-in of some kind. And they had a local but further down, and I don’t think it was that silent…” Vincent pauses again. Something almost like chagrin and certainly reluctant passes across his face, but then he looks squarely at Sephiroth. “I can’t…I know how to behave, but I…have not practiced it with others in a long time. Not with Chaos together and…you can tell.”

“Yes, and I suppose that makes it difficult to simply talk your way out of it,” Sephiroth deduces. He understands what Vincent is hesitating over now. “Wouldn’t you put them off anyway because you’re his son?”

“I don’t think they ever knew what happened to me—knowing my father, he wouldn’t have said, and most of the would have assumed I just went back to ignoring him,” Vincent says dryly. He relaxes, as if he’d been somehow concerned about a negative reaction from Sephiroth, and reaches over to turn on the tap. “They liked him, they felt sorry for him—they never asked that many questions of him. I wouldn’t go unarmed on it but there’s a chance they’d just ask first what happened to him.”

Arms. Sephiroth needs to find something like that around here—he’s practiced shooting even if firearms aren’t his preferred weapon and can make do for now, though he’d like to know what happened to his sword. “Would they…would they continue not asking questions if we persuaded them that Shinra was behind it? Would they want to protect him?”

“Maybe. But I don’t think my blood relation alone would be persuasive on the point,” Vincent says. He shifts to dip his shoulder near the faucet and begins to rub the blood off of himself. “I’m learning names and some details from listening, but I don’t know these people. He didn’t keep me updated on his contacts.”

“There were—” Sephiroth starts to turn, but then changes his mind and twists back around. “We can find some of that in the papers here. It looks as if he did bring his current work along every so often, and my knowledge isn’t as dated, though it’s narrow. If we—”

He stops. Vincent watches him—hasn’t stopped watching him—as the blood sluices from Vincent’s shoulder, then chest, then belly. The man appears content to wait on Sephiroth and it’s effective, since Sephiroth’s own impatience overrides his reservations.

“We need a way to deter Heidegger and the rest of Midgar. I think the locals won’t mind that either, if we can explain it to them,” Sephiroth finally says.

Not that he necessarily feels any more kinship with them, but they’ve wronged him far less, he thinks. And he needs to be pragmatic. From what he’s gathered so far, he won’t be in a position to free his mother from the mines, let alone from Jenova, for a good while yet. There’s too much groundwork that needs to be laid, too much still unknown, and he needs time for that. Time and no risk that someone else will stumble on those particular shafts, and it doesn’t escape him that to reduce the number of curious minds, he first needs to connect with a few.

“I can deal with that part. But it’d help if you eventually unearthed some social skills,” Sephiroth adds. “Or at least your old Turk skills. I think we’ll be needing more files than are here.”

Vincent considers this. As he does, he rolls up onto his knees and loosens his waistband, letting his trousers slide down his hips. The bloodstains track down over his groin and turn the water flowing through his fingers pink. In the mine he’d always been hunched up with his limbs twisted, body not exactly wasted but certainly not connoting any degree of health, but now he looks fit, supple muscles emerging, like their diet is sufficient to thrive on. He’s not shy about using his left hand, Sephiroth notices; his skin hasn’t taken on that hardened quality that Valentine’s had had at the end, but it nevertheless seems to have some degree of imperviousness to those claws.

“They’ll come back,” Vincent says. Then tilts his head as Sephiroth’s gaze jumps to his face. His expression doesn’t perceptibly change but Sephiroth forces himself not to look away in shame he doesn’t feel anyway. “I need to watch more. It helps me…remember being human. If you’re not reading all the time.”

“I…yes. I’ll have to go out,” Sephiroth mutters. For a moment the very thought of it feels like mud on his feet, a palpable drag, but he exhales and makes it fade. It has to be done, he has his goals, he’s made his promises. He’s going to make a life out of this, one way or the other—and there will be others.

There’s already them. It’s fact. And his reactions aren’t from shame or guilt, or anything to do with the stupidities of a world that hadn’t allowed him to risk the experience he needed to learn anything outside of hostilities. He can see that, and acknowledge that as he can his new appearance: he’s not familiar with this. It doesn’t mean he won’t become so—he and Vincent are linked now, because he decided he’d take that life out of the mine. It means he wants to, and that’s all he needs to make his decisions now.

He looks back at Vincent. “I said I’d remind you why me. We should go over this together and settle on an approach.”

Vincent nods and then turns off the water. He pushes back in the shower, then unfolds a leg and starts to peel down his trousers, only then looking away from Sephiroth. Who stays a moment, because Vincent is only concentrating on the garment and doesn’t hide himself, and then turns away to find some towels for the man.

* * *

They sit down to eat together that night, and with the halting tone of a novice but the laconic insights of an expert, Vincent explains the encounters he’s had so far and the information gleaned from each of them. He’s awkward with his knife and fork and many of his pauses come from staring at Sephiroth’s hands for cues, but by the end of the meal his tableside manner has significantly evolved.

Sephiroth offers his share of knowledge, explaining what he’s learned from the papers here, as well as where it falls short. Chiefly, that’s in the area of mapping the unknown mineral that gives that mine its transformative powers: Valentine had repeatedly tried to expand on Sephiroth’s mother’s work, and had been sampling various areas to determine concentration levels. But he’d had conflicting results suggesting that the mineral itself was dynamic, or—more likely given his last words—that some force was moving the deposits around or transforming them from plain ore and then back, and so he hadn’t been able to consistently identify a main lode or vein, or even a pattern in how they were shifting. His ‘protomateria’ hint also hasn’t led to anything yet.

One thing is clear: he hadn’t done that analysis out here but somewhere in the Corel facilities, probably sneaking his cores in alongside regular samples thanks to his relationships with the engineers. Somehow they’re going to have to investigate that further, whether by break-in or other means.

First, however, they have to fend off Heidegger and Midgar’s attentions. After the meal, Vincent digs through his father’s belongings till he finds another set of clothes he can wear—he’s fortuitously the same height and only a little narrower through the shoulders—and then produces clothing for Sephiroth. “Didn’t think you’d want to wear his things,” is all he says about where they came from.

They’re clean, and don’t smell as if someone had been killed in them. They don’t fit perfectly but do so well enough that Sephiroth isn’t materially hampered, so he wears them. He does, however, stare when Vincent next digs out Sephiroth’s sword.

“He kept it,” Vincent says tonelessly.

Sephiroth had located some of Valentine’s guns and they’re back in the bedroom. He takes the sword from Vincent, then goes to the bedroom for a belt to tie it on himself. Then, after an irritating dilatory moment, he picks up one of the guns and takes it back out with him.

Vincent looks at it, then shrugs and accepts it. “I need to practice that too.”

“Did you before?” Sephiroth asks.

“Usually got enough at work, didn’t have to think about it,” Vincent says.

“A bullet is going to be less difficult to explain than a mauling. Mauled corpses were what brought me out here,” Sephiroth points out.

The other man gives him a look, which while still expressionless, conveys the sense that Vincent understands perfectly well and still feels no need to change his behavior in this context. Which is petty and irrelevant to objectives, so Sephiroth lets it be and they go out for their first joint patrol.

They’re testing Sephiroth’s stamina, but also skirting the edges of the pattern Vincent believes the search parties are running. This first time, they don’t try to cross paths with one, but instead locate meeting points and the base camp. When Sephiroth needs to stop and eat—he is forcing himself to take exercise breaks from Valentine’s papers, but hasn’t quite figured out his new optimal caloric intake yet—they rest in a shallow ravine near the base camp and listen in as teams come and go.

Whoever is running the search seems to have expertise, but they’re not actually on-site and instead communicate via radio. Probably stuck in Corel minding Heidegger, who from the snatches they catch is on the verge of a nervous breakdown at this point.

They also catch that Hojo is trying to send his own team out. Sephiroth hisses lowly under his breath, but waits till he and Vincent have returned to the hunting lodge to explain. “He’s already sent someone, or is in the process of it. If he’s raising it publicly, he’s already done it.”

Vincent listens, but from a crouched position in the corner as Sephiroth moves restlessly around the room, thinking up and then discarding various counterplans. Too many unknowns, and as much as his instincts are goading him, Sephiroth knows that it’d be unwise to simply rush back to the mine. If nothing else, he hasn’t even begun to think about how to navigate the tunnels without constantly steeling both his and Vincent’s minds against its effects, and his worst mistake would be to render them useless while also leading others there.

He has to wait. And learn—he needs better intel before he can make any plans. And he’s unhappily admitted that, dropping down to sit irritated on the floor, when Vincent finally decides to say: “I think I remember one of the search party leads. They were around when I visited Father in the hospital—I think they hunted together occasionally.”

Sephiroth’s head comes up. He hadn’t recognized any of them, though given his very short time in the office before going out with Valentine to the shaft, that hadn’t been surprising. “Would they recognize you? Enough to not just shoot you—even if you don’t feel practiced enough to talk, we still need to raise their interest somehow.”

Vincent silently raises his left hand, then turns it slowly in the air. But then his brows twitch together. “I think I can still fake Father’s handwriting. Need to practice first—he kept your uniform too, not just your sword. Went back to the blind to cover tracks, found it all cached nearby.”

“I see,” Sephiroth says as a stopgap plan starts to take form in his mind. If he knows Hojo, then whoever the man sent likely has more motivation to find Sephiroth for the purpose of replacement rather than salvage. “Officially I’m the only surviving proof of concept—Hojo’s run through too much money and made them hide too many bodies to fund more. But he always likes throwing competition at me.”

“Also with Jenova cells?” Vincent asks.

His voice deepens and Sephiroth feels a slight frisson at it, part of him drawing towards the other man while the other part instinctively goes on the defensive. He wills those defenses towards their proper target, but Jenova appears to be dormant at the moment—or putting her efforts into another avenue. “Yes,” Sephiroth says. “No one even close to me, but he has found ways to inject Jenova extracts into adults. They don’t last very long afterward, but for a short time their abilities are significantly enhanced. A variant of that is probably what happened with the three people I came here to investigate, at least before your father got to them.”

Vincent is silent again. Then he rises and twists out of the doorway in the same motion, that abrupt fluidity still catching Sephiroth a half-beat behind. Though when Sephiroth hastily reaches for him, he stops even before Sephiroth takes his arm.

“If one of them is roaming around, don’t just maul them and drop them down a shaft. Keep the body,” Sephiroth says. “We could use it along with my uniform. Give Heidegger a reason to go back to Midgar with it—that should cause enough internal trouble to keep anyone from coming out again for a while. I think the locals will appreciate that too. I can think of an appropriate note for you to copy out that should help start that conversation.”

For a moment Vincent regards him. “Then I’ll stick to mauling,” he finally says. “But won’t go near the shafts.”

Sephiroth rasps out a short laugh. Vincent doesn’t join but the corners of his lip are a little less flat. They stand there for a second, a few inches across from each other.

“How often do you need blood?” Sephiroth asks, just as he feels Vincent’s shoulder move under his hand. “You haven’t asked—”

“I don’t need you to live on, only to remind me,” Vincent says, his lips now bent towards a frown.

“Then how often do I need to filter her out,” Sephiroth says impatiently. He sees Vincent’s pupils dilate a little but the man otherwise maintains a noticeable and very inexplicable reticence. It makes Sephiroth wonder what else he’s been watching and practicing, whether he’s started to think the better of staying here, of having dependencies; Sephiroth suddenly wishes he’d not been so buried in the papers, falling for yet another one of Valentine’s distractions. “Can you—”

“Did she try for you again? Earlier?” Vincent suddenly asks. He tilts his head and bobs it, snake-like, towards Sephiroth, gaze flicking from Sephiroth’s throat to eyes. “I thought I felt—I think I can feel that now, a little.”

He doesn’t bother to specify when this was and Sephiroth doesn’t see the point in miring down in the details. “Yes. Not actively, I caught it before she noticed. But…yes.”

Vincent’s gaze sharpens again, but not out of hunger. He draws a little nearer and Sephiroth shivers involuntarily, then irritably pulls himself up while Vincent observes, patient and unspeaking. He pointedly meets that gaze again and Vincent nods towards Sephiroth.

“Would it be better?” the man asks.

“Anything is better than her,” Sephiroth mutters. Then he makes an impatient sound because this has already dragged on for too long. They both have tasks to carry out and no time to lose, and this is—Vincent won’t make him say it, he thinks. He acknowledges what he wants but he’s still not going to sound like some fool—

He tugs at Vincent’s shoulder and Vincent rises up on his feet while craning down his head, sinking his teeth into Sephiroth’s throat almost as smoothly as the sigh that releases from Sephiroth when he does it. The pain is far less now, nearly reduced to mere pressure, and no longer feels as if it even threatens to tear Sephiroth up. And it’s better when he hooks his arm over Vincent’s back, when Vincent’s hands come up to his waist and take some of the effort of standing away so he can lean more easily—part of him thinks it’s better, bringing them closer.

Vincent pushes them back into the doorway, bracing Sephiroth against that as Sephiroth exhales a second time. The air rushing back down Sephiroth’s throat afterward is oddly warm, making him warmer and not colder as his blood is lapped up, as his knee slides past Vincent’s leg and then turns into that for extra support. He grasps clumsily at the man’s back, preferring warmth to chill, and Vincent suddenly removes himself.

One hand stays under Sephiroth’s arm, keeping him up till he can balance on his own. Then Vincent takes that away even as he’s giving the man a frustrated look, not understanding—that was barely a few mouthfuls, that can’t possibly make a meaningful difference.

“You don’t sleep enough. I can bring food and water but not that,” Vincent says. He ducks around Sephiroth into the bathroom, then comes back with a Cure Potion.

It’s on the tip of Sephiroth’s tongue to insult Vincent, but that’s—it’s petty. He doesn’t, and instead takes the Potion. “I can feel you too. Have you gone near the mine?”

“I check for tracks, but I try not to go so close that this—ore catches me,” Vincent says. He pauses. “But it—changes. Stronger and weaker. Even from the outside. Sometimes from the ground, too.”

“Oscillates?” Sephiroth asks, and when Vincent slowly nods, he nearly goes back into the bedroom and all of Valentine’s files. “We’ll need to—when we’ve sent them off. I think that’s key, I think that I can work through the data—but we need more of that and the rest of your father’s files. And time. I need time to figure this out. Tell me when you’re checking and I’ll re—I’ll ground you. I’ll stay out of the papers till you’re back.”

Vincent nods a second time. He looks Sephiroth over till Sephiroth hands him the empty Potion bottle, then takes a half-step back. “I’m not going in that direction now.”

“Then I’m going to do some more reading,” Sephiroth says, and smiles when Vincent nearly makes an exasperated expression and he recognizes elements of his own in it. “I need to learn your father’s style when he’s actually trying to communicate.”

The expressiveness vanishes from Vincent. He doesn’t appear to replace it with resentment, and Sephiroth can understand why he’s not an ideal model for how to display any other feeling towards Valentine. Besides, they both have business to attend to, so he turns back into the bedroom, while Vincent leaves to look for Hojo’s spy.

Chapter 28: Past

It takes a few days, but they set their plan into motion. Contact is made with one of Valentine’s few friends, a surveyor moonlighting on the search team who initially has to be boxed against a cliffside to be made to listen, but who had enough exposure to the particulars of Valentine’s accident to be sympathetic to another victim of a Hojo-driven assassination attempt. Sephiroth’s scars greatly assist in selling that story, as does Heidegger’s inelegant flailing about for anyone else to take the blame.

The surveyor has a decent amount of pull with the rest of the locals, particularly a subset of older miners who remember trying to work the shafts where Sephiroth’s mother and Valentine are now trapped and who had numerous unsettling experiences during that time. But they’re more alarmed about the idea that R&D has been covertly sending mutated test subjects to rampage among them, and then they share rumors that a black helicopter had recently made a nighttime run over the sparsely-populated northern side of Corel.

That’s farther than Vincent can cover on foot in a single night. If he flew—he disclosed over another dinner that one of his other forms has wings—he could, but while Sephiroth has revealed himself, Vincent has not as several of the locals are still obviously considering whether Sephiroth himself might turn wild and strike out at them. To avoid testing their truce, they decide to rely on the locals to check for tracks of any potential drop-offs and then report back. Sephiroth also provides a few pieces of his uniform for the locals to bring to Heidegger and keep him just hopeful enough that he’ll continue to hold off any official Midgar reinforcements.

For his part, Vincent does range as far as he can without tipping off the locals to his presence, looking for any sign of anyone besides the search parties. Sephiroth has some guesses as to who it might be—he rejected or cashiered out several people from SOLDIER who met Heidegger’s but not his standards—and while he’s not particularly concerned about their skills, he does start setting aside time each day to practice with his sword.

He also practices with Valentine’s guns after the first session reveals how much his reflexes have…changed. He won’t say degraded, since as far as he can tell, some of them are potentially faster, but his body doesn’t respond to his mind in quite the same way and not all of that is due to temporary loss of conditioning. He wasn’t actually in that cell for that long, for that matter, and even though he’d been recovering from Vincent’s initial attack for most of it, he still can’t account for all of the changes.

He can’t ignore them either, even though an irrational part of him initially flinches from doing so. So he spends most of the time after that session sprawled in the bedroom, steadfastly ignoring the unread papers in favor of concentrating on each finger of his hand and mentally interrogating every single sensation and thought he has until he’s certain that, whatever the problem, it lies solely with him.

Vincent comes in at one point, because when Sephiroth finally detects him, the man has obviously been there for some time. He asks nothing, only watches on as Sephiroth starts and glowers and then painfully notices a number of cramps in other body parts.

“You can tell whenever she’s rising in me, correct?” Sephiroth mutters. He digs the heels of his hands in along either side of his spine, then grunts as the muscles release. His eyes drift across the box he’d pulled out just before the training session and he grimaces again, thinking he’s completely blown all of his set goals for the day. “Jen—”

“She hasn’t since the first…” Vincent flicks his fingers towards the scars on Sephiroth’s arm, apparently to indicate their initial meeting “…tried to push into you, yes, but hasn’t gained any seat in you. Why?”

Sephiroth glances over. “Have you dusted off your sense of curiosity now?” he asks, and then slowly rolls onto one knee towards the doorway as Vincent’s mouth quirks. “Any idea how high the…existing taint level needs to be? Now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t think I ever had—had this kind of awareness of others with other—he had other trials besides me. I never was—connected that way. If anything, I felt less about them than about the general population.”

Because it’d always been very clear that there would be no alliances, no empathy, nothing except the necessity to survive and the grim reality that that required earning Hojo’s favor. And the others had always been older than Sephiroth, usually much older; he’d been pitted as a preteen against those who’d already gone through puberty. Learning first how not to be dependent on superior size and strength, so his current situation is not particularly new, he thinks.

“Might have been the tunnels,” Vincent says. He doesn’t blink or otherwise show any signs of emotion as Sephiroth comes up and investigates the food and water he’s brought. “Inside I would hear, but I don’t remember sensing anyone outside of them besides Lucrecia, Jenova and you, and with you not even till—”

“I thought you never left the place,” Sephiroth says, frowning.

“That was a long time ago. I’d stopped before you came,” Vincent acknowledges. He doesn’t move back either, even though Sephiroth’s hair drifts across his feet a few times. “The early days, sometimes I…went outside, even though it…changed me. Father’d have to drag me back in, after—drug helped with that. I knew he was giving it to me.”

Sephiroth snorts but doesn’t think now is the time to interrogate the exact degree of volition Vincent had had. He braces one shoulder against the doorway, deliberately ignoring how much of his hair that sweeps onto the other man, and eats. “How often was Hojo sending tests out here, do you remember that? And how was your father finding out about them if you weren’t sensing them?”

Vincent’s brows pinch. For a second Sephiroth thinks the man might take it as a slur on his patrolling and almost offers a proactive denial—and a genuine one too—but Vincent speaks first. “He…didn’t think Hojo believed him, his saying we’d both died before we got here. But I’m not sure, not about timing—I know he never brought anyone who didn’t have Jenova, and I think they all—they knew they’d been given something. None of them…turned like you, none of them fought me and her, just me.”

Another piece to gnaw on, Sephiroth thinks. Valentine had had his own mutations, but he and Vincent have repeatedly gone over that and Vincent remains adamant that his father hasn’t separately been housing Chaos fragments or clones or anything like that. And the three dead people Sephiroth himself had come to investigate had been locals to start with. Especially since their Jenova exposure likely hadn’t been voluntary, how had Valentine noticed so quickly? He might have been on guard due to Hojo’s past attempts, but even so, behavioral changes and recent trips to Midgar can only go so far given the normal level of traffic between the two places.

The answer here isn’t in the papers. Sephiroth still hasn’t worked his way through all of them, but even so, instinct tells him that there’s a critical gap. And cold logic tells him the blame might not all be down to Valentine: Jenova is a separate, independent actor here, not even necessarily aligned with Hojo, for all that that man probably deceives himself otherwise. It’s entirely possible that the prior Jenova-infected people had sought out Valentine in some way, and of course once they were in proximity, he might have been able to tell because of the protomateria-induced mutations in him.

But then what did they want, Sephiroth ponders. They can’t have just been seeking Valentine out to destroy him, somehow he intuits that. Jenova wants to crush out his mind and take over his body to do something with it, not simply to have it. And of the three victims, one had actually been a close acquaintance of Valentine’s. Valentine’s story about how they were connected is likely a lie, but at the same time, this idea that those three people had found something odd in the mines…Sephiroth grimaces as it becomes obvious. He should’ve already realized.

“They knew because she knows. She knows there’s this protomateria here, she knows it’s tied to hostile forces. She wants it too,” Sephiroth says, feeling himself tense all over. “Damn it, I didn’t think—we need to get whatever your father was keeping at the office—all the ore samples he took. They’re not anywhere here, and I don’t think he would’ve thrown them all out, not with how some of them tested.”

“Lucrecia said the miners said it always lost its potency outside,” Vincent remarks, with just the slightest hint of an interrogative.

“Yes. But then, they didn’t have human-size Jenova samples in close proximity to check, and I’m starting to think part of it is it needs that around to activate.” Sephiroth thinks about what he’s going to propose a little more, then decides they can’t risk being conservative here. And if he has to test his new abilities, he’d rather do it on ground of his own choosing than trapped back in Hojo’s lab. “I’ll ask the surveyor to look in his office, since we’re asking for any papers he left anyway. If any of the samples can be activated, we can’t let anyone else get them. For all we know, they might act like—like compasses.”

Vincent tenses. And looks at Sephiroth wordlessly for the rest of Sephiroth’s meal, but in the end, he doesn’t object—and rightly so, because Sephiroth’s assumptions all pan out.

But as it turns out, it also almost ends with them trapped back in the mines.

Chapter 29: Past

Sephiroth cadges a walkie-talkie out of the surveyor and then Vincent dredges up enough of his old Turks skills to help modify it and an old radio they find among Valentine’s things. That allows Sephiroth to monitor search party communications as he continues parsing through Valentine’s old papers, and so when he hears them talking about a potential campsite they’ve found and can’t account for via normal area traffic, his ears prick up.

Vincent has just left for a separate patrol that will take him near the mine. The campsite is closer, but not directly in between the hunting lodge and the mine, so Sephiroth forces himself to pull out some maps and study them before he too leaves. He’s still not nearly as familiar with the terrain as the others—Vincent’s memory may be rusty where it’s not distorted, but the aboveground area hasn’t changed very much—and he has no desire to end up stuck underground again for any reason, including his own ignorance.

He does also consider testing this connection he and Vincent have, but then the search comms burst to life again, detailing a near-fatal run-in with a seemingly hostile individual that no one recognizes. Sephiroth has no idea how much…nuance is conveyed whenever Vincent picks up on his Jenova traits, and without that, having Vincent suddenly come in on the scene might do more harm than good since they do need this Hojo plant to retain some degree of intactness. So either Sephiroth goes alone or he will have to stay in the lodge till Vincent comes, which he is not about to do.

So he writes a note for Vincent and then leaves, taking both his sword and one of Valentine’s guns with him. He keeps tabs on the search comms via the walkie-talkie as he takes a somewhat circuitous route to the area in question, swinging closer to the roads before diverting back into the brush on the assumption that his opponent should be doing the exact opposite. He doesn’t want to run into them too early, and not only because his swordsmanship is still not up to par. He wants to know which fool it is this time before he kills them.

But it is a risky maneuver. Their contacts among the searchers haven’t told everyone else about them yet, believing that that might be just a little too much for the locals to believe, what with Heidegger screaming about how Sephiroth never was right in the head and never to trust anything or anyone who comes with an R&D testimonial. If Sephiroth is seen by a search team that isn’t in the loop, it’s going to be impossible to keep it from getting back to Midgar in some way. And he didn’t tell their contacts he was going out either, because they don’t know yet that Hojo’s spy is going to die in Sephiroth’s place.

So he has to move cautiously and take his time, ducking down whenever any light comes near even if he thinks it’s a friendly party. Sephiroth can’t have the walkie-talkie on all the time either, since he can only turn the volume so low before it turns off completely and even at that level, it’s sometimes loud enough to still attract unhelpful attention. As a patience-testing alternative, all he can do is make regular detours to more isolated areas and listen till he thinks he’s caught up on events.

Thankfully, after the first run-in no one seems to have come across the interloper again, though they do now have tracks to follow and are doing so. Sephiroth did make a point of telling them that this person has likely been ‘infected’ with a version of the same ‘disease’ that the dead victims he’d come to investigate had had, explaining that said disease affects the brain and tends to draw sufferers to a certain location. Of course, he’d made it sound a good deal more predictable, so the locals think R&D has set up some sort of device and that this person can lead them to it.

There’s a lot of chatter about capturing Hojo’s plant and taking them to another unused mine while the teams try to find the R&D device before having to turn anything over to Heidegger. Most of it is nonsensical pipe dreams by people whose idea of an interrogation is something that finishes within one episode, but the actual tactics for tracking down the person that Sephiroth hears them suggest are competent enough. And they note enough details about the traces they find that Sephiroth thinks he can narrow down the likely identity of the person to two possibilities, neither of which make him terribly concerned about his recovering swordsmanship.

By then he’s made it within a mile of where the searchers currently think their target is. He’s close enough that he can see the occasional bobbing light in the distance…and also, further up on the mountain, one of the paths he and Vincent had taken on their way out. They’re still far enough off that it’s unlikely anyone will accidentally stumble into the tunnel complex where Sephiroth’s mother and Valentine are, but Sephiroth still thinks it prudent to stop and try to mentally map out how far someone can go up the mountain before that risk becomes critical.

What Sephiroth does think he knows quite well at this point is the footprint of that particular set of old shafts. Valentine had meticulously corrected and expanded on the official maps till he’d had detailed insets of every physical feature in them; even Sephiroth has to admit he’d only left out the distribution of this ‘protomateria’ mineral. But regardless of the details, or the way that distribution seems to change, the mineral doesn’t appear in significant quantities outside of that complex. So as long as Sephiroth knows how far out the tunnels run, he knows how far he can go before he or this spy might feel something.

At least, he thinks he can work that out. And then he drops flat to the ground, hand on hilt as he shallows his breathing as much as possible. He doesn’t hear or see anything but even so, he knows that there’s another.

Not Vincent either. Another—another one like her, is his initial thought. And it’s not at all like the way that he feels now around Vincent, that strange mix of attraction and shivering nerves like a child flinching at the edge of a swimming pool for the first time…it’s very much an immediate, visceral repulsion.

Before this he'd never been able to sense the other test subjects. It’d been something of a blessing, since the rest of them were not going to move forward and Sephiroth always told himself that that was the cost of his freedom. He’s not any more inclined to sympathy now, and the ability to sense them is certainly helpful in that it lets him pinpoint the other person’s location. But what he feels—that he feels them now—it’s something he has to grapple with, too. He has to make himself grapple with it, rather than simply turn and go the other way.

Bile comes up the back of his throat, and even as Sephiroth tightens his grip on his sword, he’s struggling not to hawk and spit into the dirt. He works himself around to a better position, with a large rock protecting his back and a lower stretch of bushes right before the potential sweep of his blade, but the entire time his head is—he shakes his head, then just stops himself from jerking his hand up to catch the pieces as it threatens to split in two.

Not her, not her, not her, he furiously tells himself, forcing his eyes to come back up so that he can scan the surroundings for any sign of this imposter. He’ll kill them both, drive her back into them and then slash his way after till he comes all the way upon—

No. No, no, that’s the way he lets her in, she waits till he’s thrown himself too far forward and then outflanks him and he drops his head again, all the way to the ground this time as he writhes and hisses, uncaring of how that might rattle the brush. He felt her try just now and he scrambles to seal that crack and to—to simply breathe, to breathe in and feel the air down through the contours of his own body and not that of—of—this incredible, towering, near-irresistible wave of rage.

And this isn’t only him, he belatedly realizes. Yes, his anger is part of it too but this is more than him right now, more than him screaming at Jenova. More even than Jenova, the rage—it’s coming from the earth itself, to the point that he blinks hard and stares when he realizes the ground isn’t actually shaking. And these others, they scream with him, they scream past him and suddenly, with the depth and breadth and age of their rage, he understands who had seeded the mines with that mineral, who had made it into Chaos’ incubator—and who is still trying to make something or someone that will defeat Jenova.

He's changed enough to hear them now, he must have—Vincent and his connection, it’s enough now to override the Jenova in him. And how deafening it all is, even though he understands it, even sympathizes—they aren’t trying to take over his mind the way that Jenova does, but all the same their sheer malevolence could destroy him, grinding him out of existence the way glaciers do mountains. It will destroy him if he can’t find a way to shut them out. And as he curls up on the ground, he has to admit—if this is what Vincent spent the better part of two decades trying to sleep through, if this is what his mother’s trapped with and even if this is what Valentine started to hear and meant to shield his mother from…

It’s almost impossible. If he were anyone else, it would be—but he closes himself down, makes just enough space for himself so that he can collect his thoughts in it, away from that overwhelming, thoughtless howl of fury…and he can see how directionless it is. More importantly, he can see how Jenova can learn, is learning to dodge their endless rushing charge. He’s crouching against the torrent, not trying to escape the sucking muck of their rage, but he must or else he’ll eventually lose himself here, be dragged along with them and then Jenova can take his body away—

Suddenly he’s ripped out. Sephiroth gasps in blind reflex and kicks weakly at whoever has seized him, only missing because he’s being tumbled onto his back at the same time. His head and shoulders strike hard enough against the ground to shake him dizzy—except he’s already dizzy, and the world now spins two ways at once as he stares up at Vincent’s blurring face.

Vincent is still moving. Hauling them both frantically backwards, and at first Sephiroth mistakes the great shifting blot overhead as their attacker and takes a clumsy swing at it with his still-sheathed sword. But those are Vincent’s wings, trying to extend but being buffeted to one side as the air sucks past them into the—sinkhole. There’s a sinkhole where Sephiroth had just been.

The ground finally stops crashing away from beneath them and Vincent is able to drag Sephiroth onto a stable part of the sinkhole’s rim. Unstable air currents whip wildly around them and Sephiroth sees Vincent’s wing wrench unnaturally about before the man simply makes them melt back into his back. A drop of sweat falls from Vincent’s face to sting in Sephiroth’s eye; he blinks it away and finally manages to regain enough control of himself to push up against the dirt.

That mad mob isn’t in his head anymore. He blinks hard and checks again, but…he looks down, into the sinkhole, and then stiffens as he—he can hear them, faintly, but he can’t feel them in him, not the way he can Jenova or Vincent or his mother.

And then she reaches out to him and he gasps again, scrabbling blindly again as he tries to grasp his mother before she slips away. It’s…hard to get past them, comes her thin, failing whisper, as if she has to press through the eons to reach him. Focus—they made a focus and I missed that—he and I, we missed…them. Not Chaos but…but it’s their channel, my son, it’s theirs but they lost it in their fight and it’s been here in the mines ever since, find it before it’s lost again…

“Mother—” Sephiroth says urgently as she fades.

He lunges forward. Vincent snarls and grabs him again, shoving him back, but enough of her last thought lingers that Sephiroth scrabbles away, twisting to the side of Vincent and then just free enough that he can follow—he knows there’s a sinkhole. He hasn’t forgotten but he knows now, what she’d almost had the time to see in the data and what she’d only learned after, stuck in the middle of that screaming whirlpool but hasn’t been able to say for so long, not even to Valentine—

This part of the mountains is riddled with underground seeps that can wash into the rock, can erode it and eat into hiding places, places where treasures were once secreted, and then carry them away, all the way down the mountain but underground where no one can see, creeping here and there as the vagaries of time dictate, until one day the ground simply collapses…but only for a brief time. Only briefly, before wind and dirt cover it all up again. And before that happens, he has to find it.

The nearest part of the sinkhole isn’t a straight drop, but it’s a steep one. Sephiroth skids down it, then scrambles the rest of the way to a crumbling ledge. The rock all around him is pulling at him, trying to make him think that the boundaries are blurring but he knows himself and his damned shape—he’s had practice at it, the one upside of Jenova’s attacks—and he doesn’t succumb. No, he keeps his shape and he drives down into the very heart of the illusion, using it to divine where he needs to claw at the rock until a gleaming orb is revealed.

Above him there’s a raw, agonized roar—then it cuts off as Sephiroth thinks sharply about Vincent, about the other shape he’s come to know.

He breathes raggedly, but the dirt under his hand doesn’t melt, the sky above doesn’t merge into him. Vincent’s roar is still echoing around him and those are bad enough that Sephiroth has to steady himself, but he can tell that Vincent has snapped out of the fit. And he can tell them too, with his fingers pressed to the orb: Enough. Enough, I hear you but enough. This is—this is too much, I can’t make her stop this way.

And they stop.

They’re not Jenova. They never wanted to take him over, only to see her defeated. But they’re too long removed from life now, they’ve retained only their rage and none of their knowledge. And this too isn’t even them, but only—an echo of a kind, capable of being concentrated through the orb Sephiroth has found into its own kind of weapon but with no independent will of its own. They can’t aim it themselves, no matter how they rail at Jenova, they don’t truly know where she is…they’re trapped by it too, trapped and silenced, Sephiroth realizes, and that is when Hojo’s puppet decides to try and spring out of the sinkhole at him.

Sephiroth yanks out his sword and slashes at them so they have to divert, but then the ledge starts to give way so he has to check his swing instead of making certain they’re dead. He bashes the rock a last time with his hand to knock out the—this has to be the protomateria, this glowing sphere, this thing he’s certain is the key to how the mines and their effects work—but nearly loses his chance to jump away when Jenova, damn her, has another try at him.

Vincent somehow swoops from overhead to catch him as he crumples and then rolls them both back onto solid ground. But then he immediately collapses over Sephiroth, groaning and spasming all over. The protomateria seems to be the reason, but Sephiroth has no idea how to make it stop except to keep thinking it needs to stop, as he jerks his head free enough to look for where Hojo’s spy has—

They’re a few feet away, but on their knees with their head between their white-knuckled, black-veined hands. Sephiroth has just enough time to note their hair is white at the roots, brown at the tips, and they’re wearing the old Public Security uniform.

And then they slump forward, falling first onto their face before twisting to one side. Sephiroth smells blood and something far more rotten, then sees long slits opening up along their limbs. Something black heaves out from the slits—flashlight beams suddenly criss-cross over the body and Sephiroth has the impression of an awful form pulling free of sagging flesh, right before Vincent arches up and launches himself off of Sephiroth.

“No—no, stop, he’s—” Sephiroth barely has the presence of mind to say, as he lurches up after Vincent. Not to drag the man back as he efficiently puts the mutating body out of its misery, but to throw himself the other way, into the line of fire as search team members converge on them. “That was it. That was—that’s the thing they send to kill you and take your place. Look at it, see? That was what I meant. Leave Vincent, he’s stopping—he just stopped it for you.”

Then he has to stop and catch at his own knee, gasping, to support himself. He still has the protomateria in his hand; he tucks that into his trouser pocket as he staggers forward, then allows himself to drop heavily to his knees to catch his breath. The locals are still crowding in, but without a shot yet. They’re buying it, he thinks with relief.

* * *

Of course the locals want more explanations, plus the inevitable discussion of how Vincent survived all these years. But the search teams who found them and Hojo’s plant are, thankfully, all ones the surveyor has won over, and enough of them also seem willing to believe Valentine would go to such extremes for the sake of his son that they’ll overlook the bodily alterations.

“Which is an overly romantic view on it, even if it’s more palatable,” Sephiroth has to add.

He’s exhausted. Hojo’s spy is dead and on their way to be served up to Heidegger as the perfect reason to go back to Midgar and play politics there instead, the locals are on board to cover up the sinkhole and mark the entire area off-limits, and as far as Sephiroth can tell, he and Vincent have returned to the lodge as substantively the same people who left it. These are all worthy achievements, and yet Sephiroth finds himself dwelling instead on other matters.

They’re in the bathroom now, supposedly cleaning themselves but in reality Sephiroth is staring at the sphere he dug out, which is sitting with deceptive dormancy on the sink counter, and Vincent is watching him with a blank expression. They’re the same, Sephiroth thinks, and makes himself look back at the other man instead. They’ve come up against the force in the mines twice now and been able to walk away. No, not only to walk away, but to make it be the silent party. And its conduit, this protomateria is theirs, and they’re going to study it and keep it from anyone who might wield it against them, until they learn how it’ll help stop Jenova for good and get her out of Sephiroth’s mother.

These are all things that Sephiroth wants and yet, as he sits here and looks at what he has, he can’t help but compare it to how he used to think, how he’d believed before that he had emerged victorious against all and had his hand on all the proper levers…and how wrong he’d been about that. He can’t be so complacent ever again, even he sits here with the last of the mine dust swirling down the drain and the sphere quiescent on the counter.

“They feel sorry for Father,” Vincent suddenly says. When Sephiroth looks at him, he’s ceased his staring and instead is riffling his fingertips at the edge of the water that’s puddled towards him. “I felt sorry for him…stuck in there, hearing all that, and I still feel sorry for him. Should’ve put him out of his misery instead, but he’s my father.”

“He might have regretted things but he never let that stop him from meddling,” Sephiroth snorts, and when Vincent looks up at him, he flicks his fingers towards Vincent’s left arm. “He wanted to stay, Vincent. He couldn’t stand to just leave my mother—”

“If she’d wanted him away, I would have.” Vincent’s brows rise slightly, though his voice remains steady. “You would have. And all that crying—I think he is filtering some of it. It’s not as bad as it used to be, at least for me.”

“Is that why you’d balk?” Sephiroth says. He pushes himself up, then reaches behind himself to turn off the water. “That screaming, all that anger—that wasn’t Chaos, that was—”

“No, it’s them, it’s—” Vincent makes a sharp gesture towards the bottom of the tub but looks uncertain about what he means “—some of it was. Not what they say, I can’t really make that out, but what they…feel, what they feel all crashing in and changing things—I think they let Jenova in without thinking, I think she has a way in sometimes that they miss—”

Sephiroth grimaces, then glances towards the protomateria. “Yes, I caught that. That’s going to stop—that has to stop. If your father wants to make them stop so I can have the time to work this out, that’ll be more useful.”

Vincent nods silently, not pointing out that he’s not responsible for the man, or even in communication with him. Instead he moves his hand through the pooling water again, frowning at how it divides before his fingers, and then exhales as he pushes himself from a hunch into a straight-backed squat, twisting to get out of the tub.

Something on his ribcage just under his arm catches Sephiroth’s eye as he moves and before Sephiroth thinks, he’s caught Vincent by the elbow. The other man lets himself be stopped, then shifts to look curiously down as Sephiroth puts his other hand out and touches the faint bullet scar, the only scar Vincent still seems to carry. This is where Hojo caught him, Sephiroth thinks.

Dark strands of hair drift into Sephiroth’s view as he rubs a thumb over the place. “Do I make them quieter?” he asks.

“Do you make it better for me?” Vincent replies, with enough of a sardonic tone that Sephiroth flicks an annoyed glance up. But there’s no mockery in the man’s eyes, only intent focus. “I don’t need that now.”

Sephiroth starts to point out that Vincent did or else they’d have never gotten out of the mines, but then bites down on his own words. He…thinks perhaps that it’s their connection, that strange tingling he’s feeling, but as Vincent tilts his head and the man’s breath coasts over his face, he suddenly knows that that isn’t it either, and that he’s being unacceptably naïve in trying to think so. He’s already made up his mind about this, he thinks irritably, and at the same time he knows he’s still fooling himself. This is new ground he’s on.

“Father wasn’t going to get me out on his own. He did want to—he did try, but he wasn’t…enough. Not just that he didn’t know how,” Vincent adds after a moment. Leaning closer, close enough that his forearm grazes across the top of Sephiroth’s knee, and yet his tone is still oddly reticent. “You had more will, you weren’t just clearer. But we’re out now—”

“Fugitives with no idea how much Hojo extracted from Jenova, let alone how much of her is still left to poison the ground,” Sephiroth does remind the man. Nearly all of the water’s gone now, but there’s still enough of a film for him to skim his fingers through it and then send the drops against Vincent’s chest. He watches Vincent as he does, and when the man doesn’t flinch, adjusts how he’s sitting so he no longer has to stretch to reach Vincent. New ground but he shouldn’t shake, he thinks, he’s not going to let it cave under him here. “And now there’s whoever made that materia, and taking it out hasn’t taken out all its traces from the mines, I’m fairly—”

Vincent’s mouth quirks. “I haven’t said I’m leaving.”

Sephiroth scrapes his breath over his teeth, then stops himself from coming out with something purely defensive. That’s never an effective response to teasing, and he does think it’s teasing; Vincent’s quest to relearn how to act like a person apparently can’t avoid the nuisance behaviors. “Then what are you saying?”

“I wasn’t. You asked me,” Vincent says, obtuse and knowing it.

But then he abruptly shifts closer, and the nearness of his body alone cuts off Sephiroth’s words. Both of them are here, survivors, and beyond them, Sephiroth’s mother and, despite Sephiroth’s own distaste, Vincent’s father. And more now too, an entire screaming psychic mob that they now know about. That’s the difference between then and now: Sephiroth had always thought of himself alone in triumph, alone and above…and he can’t picture that anymore. But he can picture how lonely madness looks. He took that out of the mines with him.

He doesn’t want to see himself like that. He doesn’t think he does see that, reflected back in Vincent’s eyes. And he…he draws a long breath, as the realization sinks in…he wants not only the necessary sacrifices to be free but also the…power, and it is a power, to be human. No, more than that: he wants the power to be human with others.

Sephiroth deliberately touches Vincent’s bullet scar again, then catches himself fingering the side of his neck with his other hand. Then catches Vincent watching him, and something changing in the other man’s eyes when Sephiroth shrugs and tilts his head so it’s easier to see, the way he’s feeling Vincent’s scars on his own skin. These are the evidence of it, of what they’ve done, what they are, and thinking of it that way, Sephiroth no longer feels as if touching them is touching something—alien, flawed, something that shouldn’t be there.

And it doesn’t seem to bother Vincent at all, at least not in that way. He’s still staring as Sephiroth pulls back some of his hair. “I used to draw the line at children,” he says, very softly.

He inhales a little as Sephiroth moves his other hand up the man’s side, away from the bullet scar and towards the back so Vincent has to drop even closer.

“I never was a child, much less now,” Sephiroth tells him. “And I don’t need to make it better for you. Or you to make it better for me. It is better, it’s not—it’s not even the same, we’re not, I need you to—listen to me, I’m saying I want—”

Vincent tilts his own head, expression unreadable. “Father didn’t know what he wanted till he’d lost it,” he remarks.

“And neither of us are ending up in a crystal like him,” Sephiroth says sharply, as he loses patience and pulls Vincent down towards him.

Not a practiced move. He’d educated himself, of course; Shinra is so rife with vices that to be unfamiliar with any even if one didn’t indulge in it would have been below foolish. But he hadn’t bothered beyond having the knowledge, hadn’t ever felt even the political exigency to lower himself to the frivolous offers he’d received, not when they would’ve only distracted from his own goals. And this isn’t a goal either, but living. It’s the most basic, fundamental part of humanity, the reason why Sephiroth had never been able to allow Hojo to crush away his sense of self and the reason why his mother had struggled so hard to the very end and even now, still tries to reach him. An alien like Jenova sees no more than conquest, an elemental like Chaos only change, and that force channeled through the protomateria their eternal grievances. And to beat any or all of those is only to beat them; what comes after the victory is to live.

Living, of course, isn’t always finesse. It's a clumsy kiss. Vincent’s upper teeth clip Sephiroth’s lower ones, and when Sephiroth hastily angles his mouth the other way, his back slips against the wet tub. He pushes out his elbow to catch himself, flushing with irritation—which somehow doesn’t diminish the sense of urgency he feels, to have this moment of living and confirm it before some externality intrudes yet again—and Vincent wraps both hands about his face. Tips it up but doesn’t come to meet it, bobbing away whenever Sephiroth tries until Sephiroth finally spares a second to make an exasperated sound.

Then the man stoops back down, and kisses Sephiroth through his surprise until he grasps the point here: Vincent knows how. Knows how and is willing to demonstrate, to move lips and tongue and then rein in his own desires till Sephiroth mimics him. And then again, the stop-start nature of their kissing a frustrating way to go about it but not actually off-putting. On the contrary, it seems to strengthen Sephiroth’s frisson into outright shivers, intensifies the urgency into arousal that flows liquidly into every limb.

Sephiroth slides his hands along Vincent’s body, then pins them to the man’s waist as Vincent’s fingers tease up the insides of his thighs. His mouth slides free of Vincent’s for a needed gasp of air, and then he twists his head to the side, inviting the way that Vincent’s lips continue traveling across his jaw. “Do it,” he rasps. “Do it—don’t care if they all feel it, make her feel it so she knows—never her damned puppet—never anyone’s—so long as I’m the one who has—”

Vincent’s growl vibrates against Sephiroth’s throat and the thumbs Sephiroth has pressed to the man’s belly. His teeth scrape at Sephiroth, hard enough that Sephiroth kicks the tub as he arches into it. But they don’t break the skin and the denial is almost enough for—Sephiroth twists in cheated pleasure and thinks almost he likes it better. He drags at Vincent again, but then the man’s fingers rub up between his legs, making him buck so sharply that he nearly loses his hold on Vincent.

More fingers close around his cock and startle him into panting. His legs had closed but they sag open again, Sephiroth learning how to bow through the initial rush and then ride up onto the cresting wave of heat as Vincent’s knuckles drag along his perineum. He presses his moans into Vincent’s shoulder, then crooks himself again as Vincent bites his throat. Still short of blood but it’s rising to meet the man, Sephiroth can feel that. He’s rising, all of him is rising—and then the teeth slip through his skin, very little pain this time and what is there only provides the spark that ignites the rest of him.

Vincent drinks from him, delicate little laps, as Sephiroth subsides against the side of the tub. Body quaking, cock twitching even as Vincent’s thumb rubs out the last of his come. His knee sways off the tub to bump at Vincent but then droops back as the fingers massaging his prostate rock upwards. He lets the edge of tub prop up his head and watches Vincent finally lift, lips scarlet and one ruby dot right on the point of the chin…Sephiroth rolls his head and Vincent doesn’t even look as he moves to let Sephiroth lick that away.

A little strength returns. Sephiroth tugs at Vincent’s hips, then works his head up the wall so he can clean the blood off Vincent’s mouth. Vincent puts one arm up by his ear to brace against the wall and then swipes his tongue between Sephiroth’s lips, coming out clean—then returning freshly slicked with blood. Vincent has bitten it just enough so that Sephiroth can suck a mouthful before it heals over. Sephiroth brushes his still-trembling hand against the other man, hip and then thigh, and Vincent huffs lowly into his mouth, not shocked, before taking his hand and helping it find the other man’s cock.

It's limp—softening and sticky at the head. Vincent came at some point, possibly when he was…Sephiroth shivers a little, then makes himself straighten against the tub. When Vincent tries to slip his hand away, he grabs the man’s wrist and then pulls Vincent’s fingers up to the side of his neck, to where the skin is knitting. And when he shivers this time, he doesn’t fight it. He lets himself sink into it, looking up at the other man.

Vincent pushes himself up again, staring back. He…was never going to look anything so brainless as ecstatic, Sephiroth thinks, and anyway that would have been as repellant as disgust. Sephiroth isn’t a mere source of nutrients, or a useful way to keep Chaos in check, and Vincent studies Sephiroth as if what draws him is far more complex than either. And he doesn’t pull his hand away this time, and instead slowly traces the healing bite as Sephiroth studies what he looks like when he realizes how human he still is.

Though it’s not all they have to learn. So they do have to climb out of the bath, and then feed themselves and tend to various chores. They’ll have to be up in a few hours to meet with the locals and finetune the story for Heidegger—then they’ll need to find somewhere to store the protomateria. But Sephiroth needs to rest, so he climbs onto the bed with the protomateria shut in a core sample tube beside him.

Vincent joins him. The man has never done that before, but Sephiroth only thinks to ask, “When are you checking the mine?”

“When you wake,” Vincent answers. He glances away, then back at Sephiroth before his eyes settle on the sample tube. “I’m not sleeping.”

In case the materia acts up. Sephiroth nods, then draws up the blankets over himself. The top of his head brushes Vincent’s hip and he pauses. Then slides his arm under the blankets, gathering them along as he searches out Vincent’s ankle. He wraps his hand around it, blankets falling over Vincent’s feet.

The other man looks on but doesn’t stop Sephiroth, with that perpetual close yet emotionless gaze as if, for all that he seemed to recall past experience perfectly well in the bathroom, his memories are useless here. A flicker of irritation goes through Sephiroth, and then he pushes it away and digs his head into the pillow instead. If they need to tackle it after he’s woken, then they’ll do it then. Vincent’s not leaving him, after all.

Notes:

Sephiroth is somewhere between eighteen and twenty here, and he definitely looks like it. Vincent's just been having to deal with the return of his sense of guilt, among all his other human emotions.

Okay, and Vincent also does recognize that Sephiroth is super-inexperienced, because I don't see how this take could've risked even one-night stands. And Sephiroth educating himself probably meant he read very dry scientific studies or very disturbing ER personnel reports, and then reviewed some equally problematic surveillance footage. Vincent's even further removed from having to deal with newbies than he is from having to deal with people, period. He's trying to be a moderately good person about this in the middle of his whole identity shift and newfound freedom and screaming Cetra ghosts and stuff.

Chapter 30: Present

When Zack lands, it’s in the back of an idling truck. Sephiroth is already crouching near the cab, leaning down to speak through the back window with the driver. Zack just glimpses Dyne’s face before the truck surges forward, sending Zack—who hasn’t fully settled—careening into the side of the truck bed. He ducks down to grab at an anchor loop and just in time, because a canvas cover goes shuttling overhead, barely missing the tips of his hair.

Now lying flat as well, Sephiroth shimmies down the length of the truck bed to fasten down the cover. He needs about a second for that and works around his sword, which has to go slightly off-center to fit, as if he does this a lot.

“Usually not, but your lockdown made it impossible to get in any other way,” Sephiroth says, because Zack had actually said that out loud. He pushes back up, braces his foot with a practiced kick against another anchor loop, and then settles on the other side of the truck bed. “Dyne tells me someone did take body bags out of Heidegger’s charter. We knew when it landed that it was carrying one of Hojo’s leftovers because it triggered our alarms. We let that Turk shut it up because it was about time people were reminded what Jenova does and you’d realize it’s not the people of Corel who are trafficking in monsters. But I didn’t realize it’d killed Heidegger. I thought you’d go in there to arrest him before it got that far.”

“But I saw you,” Zack says. He grunts as the truck goes over a speed bump; the shock absorbers aren’t doing much but Dyne actually is slowing for it, so Zack assumes that the truck hasn’t been spotted during whatever distraction had drawn off the Turks. “You were—in the hangar—”

Sephiroth raises his brows. “I was not,” he says calmly. “What you saw was a manipulation. Jenova has that ability.”

Well, okay, Zack had known something was going on, but how he was supposed to guess—he exhales. He’s still confused and angry, and now he’s—basically going all-in with a rogue SOLDIER who, whatever else he’s doing, clearly doesn’t feel any loyalty to Shinra. He doesn’t fucking know what he’s doing, he thinks, that is what he’s doing.

But he is doing it. So he better at least get some answers. “Okay, look, first—those three people who died, the whole reason Cloud and I came out—they were all mauled, and people said they’d been talking to your ghost—”

“Clearly I’m not dead,” Sephiroth remarks, because he is, Zack is rapidly coming to understand, not a naturally helpful person.

“—and you were on the security footage for those,” Zack goes on doggedly. He sees how Sephiroth’s brows pinch, like that also wasn’t quite to plan. “I saw that myself—it looked like you, like a ghost you. Angeal and I and Cloud all saw. So if you still weren’t there, was it still you—did you make that show up?”

The truck makes a turn, and then another turn. Then it slows to a stop, probably because they’re at an intersection. “Got an extra if you need it,” Dyne mutters from the cab.

“I was there for those three,” Sephiroth says, narrow-eyed but apparently deciding to turn down whatever Dyne’s offering. Then he looks at Zack for a couple minutes, waiting until the truck starts moving again before he replies. “I shouldn’t have been on the footage. We dealt with that, so I don’t know—never mind. What’s relevant to you is yes, we ensured their physical death. You have to understand, those people actually died long before.”

“Look, I don’t—I don’t know what that means,” Zack snaps. Then he sees Sephiroth’s sword move and he pushes back against the wall of the truck bed, grabbing over his head for its edge so he can rip away the canvas to jump out if he has to. “I’m only here because I want to—”

“Save that other SOLDIER,” Sephiroth says. He hasn’t moved. The truck had jostled his sword but he doesn’t so much as blink as he adjusts it. “I can’t guarantee that. I can tell you why not, but—”

“Fine,” Zack spits. “Fine, fine, just tell me something—”

“That will need to wait till we’re back. Not only for security—because I doubt you’ll believe me without seeing evidence and I don’t have that here,” Sephiroth finishes calmly. The truck bounces again, hard enough that he lets out a grunt. He adjusts his sword again, then cranes to peer through the back window of the cab at Dyne, who makes a rapid hand signal of some kind. “Also I need your phone.”

Zack sucks in his breath and slaps his hand over that pocket. Then he yanks out the phone, keeping an eye on Sephiroth as the other man turns back. When he thinks he sees the Sephiroth shift towards him, he jerks back again, then hurriedly pulls off the phone’s back and yanks out the battery. He tosses that across the truck—Sephiroth catches it and tucks it away while still watching Zack—and then scans the phone’s exposed innards, checking on the other man every half-second while he does.

“They didn’t have it for that long and it’s my phone, it’s got my scuff marks—there’s no tracker. They can’t have hidden one that fast,” Zack says. When Sephiroth’s brows twitch, Zack snatches the phone up against his chest. “It’s the only way I can contact Cloud. They can’t triangulate till I turn it back on, but I can’t just let you smash it—”

“Fucking stupid idea,” filters back from the cab. “I’m just—”

“Do we know where he is yet?” Sephiroth asks. Low but with enough of an edge that Dyne stops complaining. Sephiroth doesn’t look that happy about winning the argument, but does make a kind of ‘truce’ gesture at Zack. “You can keep it so long as it’s like that. We’ll leave you the moment we think someone is coming. As I said back there, I don’t need a meeting with General Hewley right now.”

Zack nods tightly. He wasn’t lying about not seeing an obvious tracker, or that to put in one of the tiny ones, the Turks would’ve needed a lot longer, or to have swapped his phone. But he does end up adding, “I’m not calling them. I don’t know what the hell they’re going to do with Cloud anymore. I don’t—I don’t know what you’re up to either, but as long as you let me try to talk him down first—”

“I said I would,” Sephiroth says pointedly.

Then he stops talking for the rest of the drive. Which isn’t that long, maybe another five minutes of careening through the streets, and then they start descending. They can’t have gone far enough to get out of Corel, so they must have driven into an underground garage of some kind. A really deep one, at least three levels before the truck finally pulls up.

Zack takes his cues from Sephiroth, who stays put until Dyne comes around and pulls off the cover. When the other man sits up, Zack sits up. When Sephiroth climbs out of the truck bed—smiling thinly at how Zack stays directly behind him—Zack does the same.

They’re in some kind of storage bay for forklifts and other heavy equipment, with high stacks of metal barrels filling in the gaps. A couple people are there to meet Zack and some of them were on the team that opened up the mine with Dyne and Barret, but they look different now—they’re wary where their expressions aren’t completely closed up. Dyne goes over and has some tense whispered conversations, and the rest of them all move with him so that Sephiroth and Zack are left on their own to the other side of the truck.

Sephiroth is checking on something. He’s looking up at the ceiling so at first Zack follows his gaze, but when it doesn’t end at a security camera or anything obvious like that, Zack checks the man’s face and finds that Sephiroth’s lips are moving very slightly, as if he’s talking to himself. Or as if—Sephiroth drops his gaze to Zack before that thought can finish, then gestures for Zack to follow him over to a small office at one side of the bay.

The others all spread out through the bay, clearly with other tasks on their mind. None of them seem to be taking up guard positions, which Zack does find surprising, unless they’re just as wary of Sephiroth as they are of Zack. But then Dyne does jog back over to Sephiroth for a second; they don’t speak, he just shows Sephiroth something on his phone screen and then puts it away when Sephiroth nods.

Then he goes back to the truck. Sephiroth produces a keycard and swipes into the office, then steps inside and pivots around to hold the door for Zack. He nods at a chair near him.

“Sit down and I’ll show you who Jenova is, and why she’s concerned with this Cloud,” he says.

Last chance, Zack thinks. Last chance to turn around, last chance to try and go back to everything he used to know—and that decides him. He walks in.

Chapter 31: Present

It is pretty insane. Mutagenic extracts from alien life-forms, well, that does actually track for R&D in the Hojo era, but then Sephiroth layers on that Shinra hadn’t actually junked that stuff after he’d disappeared and Hojo was exiled. They’d just watered it down, letting Hollander come up with what he claimed was a ‘dead’ version that wouldn’t ever start reproducing itself within a human body.

“Cell lines. Angeal said something about different cell lines—I’m from his,” Zack recalls.

“If you trust him to say so, possibly. It’s been difficult to collect information about Hollander’s research from here, since for obvious reasons I don’t care to ask in person,” Sephiroth says dryly. Despite that, he has copies of R&D documents on a phone he pulls out, copies that he lets Zack scroll through as he explains the terms. And then he shows Zack the footage. “Most of what we know, we’ve learned after having to kill a recipient of her cells. They periodically show up here. Jenova knows I’m here and she is the one controlling them, but I doubt what she’s doing has completely escaped Hollander’s attention.”

Zack watches otherwise ordinary people suddenly contort and fall to the ground, bones snapping through flesh, eyes popping from sockets, gashes mysteriously opening up all over their bodies…and then some kind of other lifeform trying to shuck those off like they’re only cocoons. Except it’s no butterfly, the thing trying to crawl out of them—and even just watching the footage, Zack feels not just sick but something—something deeper than that, deep down twisting inside of him like it knows what that thing is.

Inside of him. He finds himself squeezing down his arm, and then he looks down and exhales so roughly he starts when he realizes that those gashes haven’t opened up on him.

He looks back up to find Sephiroth looking closely at him. It’s the same as how the man had studied Zack when he’d first appeared in Zack’s room, genuine shock carefully hidden under cautious curiosity. “I do think he doesn’t know why she keeps directing them here, and that it’s not necessarily aligned with his own goals. Hollander does seem to actively worked to reduce the number of potential triggers for that kind of change, and possibly also sensitivity to them,” Sephiroth says after a moment. “The three you came to look at—they didn’t behave quite like the other recent ones, but more like the old…and Heidegger now. From what you said, Heidegger died this way and then you hallucinated seeing me there with his body.”

“Not just me, also Cloud and C—” Then Zack stops himself. He—can’t take Cissnei out of this, not the least because she put herself into it. But at the same time, he’s not here to just…get back at people. Not before he gets Cloud back, anyway.

So he just explains to Sephiroth what they found in the hangar and then what happened after that. He doesn’t leave out that there were more people than him, but he doesn’t dwell on exactly who. Sephiroth seems pretty well-informed anyway via the locals, and it seems like the only reason he was behind on Heidegger was because he’d been in the mines, getting ready to trick Zack into finding him, and then Rufus had shown up so fast that his on-site friends hadn’t been able to slip him updates before they’d taken him back to Midgar.

Sephiroth is very intent on catching up now, and much as Zack hates to admit it, is way more direct in explaining why than Angeal had been. The other man had thought Heidegger was bringing another person infected with Jenova, but it’s pretty obvious at this point that Heidegger must have gotten infected or dosed or however you want to put it himself. Maybe the pilot too, although from a couple questions Sephiroth asks and the way he asks them, Zack gets the impression that he thinks Heidegger killed the pilot before that got anywhere. And the chip of stone that they’d found in the plane gets Sephiroth’s attention for a whole set of questions on its own.

“There were similar chips in the apartments of the three you were alerted to,” Sephiroth says. He frowns and stands back from Zack to look through the office’s window at the storage bay. “Testing here demonstrated that they didn’t appear to be local. They’re a new development.”

“That wasn’t in the briefing we got,” Zack says. Which honestly shouldn’t make him grimace in disgust at this point, but he does. Then something else occurs to him. “Is that what you were after back there? The rock we found?” Zack says.

“No—not at first,” Sephiroth says. He’s glancing at the window again and it takes a little effort for him to pay attention to Zack again, though he makes it clear that he doesn’t think Zack was going to do anything with that opening anyway. “We didn’t let Midgar have those other chips. I didn’t know about the one Heidegger brought till just now, but we should find—we were here because of other—your entire visit was interfering with other business we had. But we’ll want that rock now. I guarantee no one in Midgar has any idea how to control it.”

Zack exhales roughly. He can’t help wanting to stick up for what he knows—what he used to know. What he used to want to defend, but now he doesn’t—he tries another question, and it’s as much to distract himself as because he honestly needs the answers. “Wait, so what, you were upset a Midgar team was poking around and going to find something besides you? I mean, there’s already aliens using people for cocoons so what else is there?”

Sephiroth nods again, seeming distracted, but then he suddenly pivots back to Zack. “You handled this stone yourself? Directly?”

“I wasn’t bare-handing it, they teach us a little better than that,” Zack says defensively. He catches himself feeling at his forearm again. “But I was in proximity to it for…I don’t know, under an hour, if you count when we didn’t know it was there.”

“And aside from seeing what you thought was me, you didn’t hear or see anything strange,” Sephiroth says slowly. He’d started to turn back to the window yet again, but snaps his head back just in time for Zack to wince. His brows tick up. “The chips are different, a new kind of trigger. They’re—not live, so to speak, but they’ve been exposed to Jenova in some way…I can pick it up myself. I think if I tried, I might be able to activate them like materia. For the three you came to investigate, they activated their chips prior to transforming, but someone else would have had to do it in the hangar for you to see this ‘ghost’ of me.”

“Well, I don’t know who would’ve done that. Heidegger and that pilot were dead at that point, and the only other people who were there were not—and I get everything you’re telling me, but I just don’t…get why,” Zack has to say. He really does believe Sephiroth, and not just because he’s angry at Angeal or because of the evidence Sephiroth has, but because, despite the man giving him an insane sequence of events, the sequence does all fit together. Everything explains the next thing…except when Zack tries to think about it overall, he still trips over something. “Hollander’s horrible, but he’s very definitely motivated by money and fame and wanting to control people. He wants Angeal and the rest of us to be good SOLDIERs because that’s how he gets to scare the other execs, not because he has some—bizarre dream about improving people by killing off humanity.”

Sephiroth is just outright staring out the window now, but spares a second to shrug diffidently. “Forgive me if I’ve no interest in the hopes and dreams of a Shinra executive,” he says. “I only want to know if he’s actually located her body and that’s why these last three are different. We thought he’d long since run down Hojo’s old stock of original samples.”

“I actually think that that’s r—”

But before Zack can finish, something…kind of whooshes outside. He’s got the impression of a big black thing in the air, like somebody brought down a giant bird and then let it loose. And then Sephiroth is out the door before Zack can even get all the way out of his seat to see what the thing is.

Sephiroth leaves the door open, so through the doorway Zack sees him stride briskly over to a forklift. He stops in front of it, looking at its roof, and a second later somebody hops down from that: another man, a little shorter than Sephiroth, with a rifle slung over one shoulder and something in his hand that makes Sephiroth physically recoil when he sees it. Then Sephiroth braces himself and takes a closer look, seizing the other man’s wrist and pulling it towards him.

Enough of the thing shows that Zack recognizes that chip from the plane, still in the case they’d put it in. He’s out of the office and halfway across the bay before he notices there are half a dozen weapons trained on him—though Sephiroth’s sword and his friend’s rifle aren’t among them. They look up as Zack slows but don’t seem about to stop him, so he does keep walking.

He also recognizes the other man, sort of. There’s been a lot of changes from the photo Zack saw, but not so many that he can’t spot the likeness. “Valentine?” he says. “One of you?”

Sephiroth makes an amused sound. He steps out of the way of the rifle barrel, which stays lowered but which does move to point in Zack’s direction. “Vincent,” says the other man tonelessly.

“Right,” Zack says. He keeps his hands visible and stops after another step. “That’s what we found in the plane.”

The amusement wipes off Sephiroth’s face. He still has Vincent’s wrist, not that Vincent seems at all uncomfortable with that, and instead of taking the container from Vincent, he just pushes Vincent’s arm in Zack’s direction. “This is like the other ones, but bigger. Where is Midgar sourcing these?”

“Nibelheim,” Vincent says before Zack can even deny knowing. He doesn’t blink at the sharp way Sephiroth turns back to him. “I recognize it now—this is what it felt like when she and I were—”

“But who’s taking them from there? R&D doesn’t have a presence anymore, we found out that much,” Sephiroth says to him.

Low enough that Zack isn’t sure the man meant it to be a three-way discussion, but that cold feeling is back, and so strong it pretty much slams the words out of him. “Cloud’s from Nibelheim. But look, look—” he puts his hands up as Sephiroth twists to face him again “—he’s in SOLDIER, he hates R&D just like we all do, he wouldn’t be doing Hollander’s dirty work—”

Sephiroth’s eyes narrow, but alongside the contempt in them is a weird flicker of sympathy. “He’s not acting on behalf of anyone in Shinra, Fair. I explained—”

“Well, he’s not just a mind-destroying alien either!” Zack has to snap. “I know him—I’ve known him since he got to Midgar, he can’t have been faking the entire—you said they can’t fake that long! They turn into those insect things! He’s not an insect—he was texting me right after we airlifted you out!”

Vincent glances at Sephiroth, then tugs his arm free and steps to the side as Sephiroth walks up to Zack. He’s still only about a half-step behind, and from the way he’s hovering there, the glance wasn’t a see-you-later kind of thing.

“Then why is Shinra running around trying to recapture him too?” Sephiroth asks. “We are intercepting your comms. First they said to kill on sight, but now—”

“Because Angeal’s—” Zack exhales, then presses his hands to his forehead to try and get his words straight before he explains. He needs to get this right, and he only has the one shot. “Angeal thinks like you do, that this is some R&D fuck-up and that’s the standard protocol, we always take those out, but Cloud’s SOLDIER and—and also Rufus Shinra showed up and he keeps—hinting that Cloud had something done to him before he left Nibelheim. He was just a kid, Hojo was just there for a year and nobody was supposed to go near him, but…Rufus doesn’t want to just write him off before we know for sure. And I think he’s right.”

“Why?” Sephiroth says.

Vincent also seems interested now, looking on from Sephiroth’s shoulder. “Hojo is dead.”

“Yeah, he is, but—he left a lot of trash around Nibelheim, and the reactor was all kinds of junked up, and the locals were living in that. It wasn’t like they could do anything about it on their own, okay? Rufus got banished there for a bit because it was such a mess, but he actually fixed it up and got to come back, and I guess he and Cloud met at some point because they’re…” Zack gestures awkwardly, still not really wanting to say it even though he does think Rufus was telling the truth about it; somewhere in the bay someone barks a laugh but that stops when Sephiroth raises one hand “…and there’s something else Angeal said, okay? He said they knew there was something weird here that’d affect people, but that anyone from his ‘cell line’ was okay and me and Cloud are both that way. Cloud’s a Second, he’s had treatments. And Angeal said—he’d be okay too, that he’d worked out something, not from R&D.”

Sephiroth listens very intently, and surprisingly, without any attempts to interrupt with questions or exclamations. But at the end he looks annoyed. “If you’re attempting to tell me that Jenova can be controlled, let me assure you that I—”

“I’m not trying to tell you that, I still don’t know half of what people have been doing here or there or anywhere. But I’m saying Angeal came here because he didn’t think that chip or whatever you have here was going to mess with his head either,” Zack says desperately. He doesn’t want to give away Ifalna’s name, but at the same time he can see that skepticism is winning out on Sephiroth’s face. “He said he’d worked out something and I didn’t know what he meant, but if he meant Jenova—he said he found it in old Cetra research.”

That means something, both to Sephiroth and to Vincent. Sephiroth had been turning away to call out to someone across the bay, but he twists back around. His shoulder just misses Vincent’s chest as the other man steps forward. Something about the eerily fluid way Vincent isn’t blocked by Sephiroth puts the wind up Zack’s back and he takes a step backward, his hand going involuntarily to his phone.

“And look at me, okay?” Zack says. “I’m not—okay, I heard and saw a couple weird things but I’m not turning into—into whatever those were, and I’m not—that thing you have there, it’s not making me do anything—”

Sephiroth is now a little behind Vincent, but Zack has the strong impression that that’s reinforcement positioning and not hiding. But the man does tilt his head, and when he does that, Vincent pauses. “He wasn’t reacting,” Sephiroth mutters. “Not in the cave and not—”

“It’s not active right now,” Vincent says back. Then he deliberately looks all around them, like somehow the parked equipment and barrels make his point for him.

“We found something that…mediates her influence to a certain extent,” Sephiroth says. It takes a moment for Zack to catch on that that’s for his benefit. “A certain mineral in the mines. We’ve transferred a good deal of it here and a few other locations. So it’s not that surprising that you don’t hear her here.”

“But I didn’t hear her there either. The only—honestly, the only things I’ve heard that I can’t explain—” for one more second, Zack’s impulse to just not believe trips him up, but it’s just old, bad habit, and just takes a frustrated huff to make it crumble “—they didn’t sound like some alien trying to tell me to take over the world. I’m not saying she doesn’t exist, okay, you’ve got me, but what I heard was just—just some other person’s name, and—”

“Whose name?” Sephiroth asks with a little sigh. He’s clearly on the verge of just writing Zack off.

So what the hell does Zack have to lose now, by telling the truth? His friends are either insane or in hiding or trying to find each other to kill each other. “Lucrecia—that’s how we started t—”

Sephiroth jerks forward, and this time he pushes right into Vincent’s shoulder like it’s nothing as he bears down on Zack. “You heard what?”

“That,” Zack says. His hand tightens reflexively around his phone, because he doesn’t have his sword with him and Sephiroth is, if nothing else, not someone you want to face with just bare hands. But he doesn’t back down. He doesn’t have anything to lose, but he’s still fighting for something, he thinks. He might still be able to fix his own mistakes. “That name. Lucrecia. Dr. Valentine’s old assistant—we, uh, we found a photo of her in Dr. Valentine’s office…and I didn’t know who she was or even that she existed at that point but I just—I saw it and I heard her name. In my head.”

For a long moment Sephiroth just stares at him. It’s like…like the man is slicing into Zack just by doing that, slicing and opening him up and checking all the things that have made him him. And somehow Zack gets the idea this isn’t just his imagination but that there’s actually some kind of—like when medical puts you through a scan, always saying you’re not going to feel a thing but you still get that feeling something extra is going on.

Then Sephiroth takes a step back and turns to Vincent. Who’s already staring back at Sephiroth, the two of them communing on a very serious-looking wavelength. When Sephiroth finally clears his throat and faces Zack again, Vincent keeps gazing at him and not Zack.

“And you said Hewley claimed you’re from his—they gave you your enhancements based on him,” Sephiroth says.

“Yeah. Yeah, if that makes a difference, then Cloud also—” Zack starts.

He doesn’t get to finish because Sephiroth suddenly pulls out something and tosses it to him. Zack is so tense that initially, he yanks out his phone and uses that to parry, but just as he hits the thing, he realizes what it is: his phone battery.

Cursing, he dives for it and manages to snag it just before it clatters to the ground. Then he straightens up.

“This Cloud,” Sephiroth says. “Why do you think he went AWOL once you found me?”

“I don’t know,” Zack snaps. He almost throws the battery back at Sephiroth, because this has to just be some joke on him. This whole thing—he shakes himself, forces his thoughts back on the one goal he has at the moment: get to Cloud before anyone else. “He is from Nibelheim, I can’t say he didn’t see more going on there than the official line, and—he hasn’t been a Second for that long. Maybe he noticed something. He’s good at digging things up, that’s why I li—why, what do you think is going on with him? Anything besides he’s gonna change into a killer alien mutant?”

“I’m not certain either,” Sephiroth says, much to Zack’s surprise. He even hesitates as if he’s debating how smart it is to keep explaining things to Zack. “We’ve cleaned out most of that part of the mine and only left a few trigger traces, but you both passed them without issue. But he didn’t come back out with the rest of you, and I can assure you that that was not part of our plan.”

“Has he said anything about meeting Hojo in Nibelheim?” Vincent suddenly asks. He shifts as Sephiroth glances at him, frowning like…maybe Sephiroth’s a little worried about him as well as where this is going. There are some confusing vibes around them, not that Zack needs to be paying attention to that. “Or—no, he’s too young. Barret sent me a photo, he’s younger than you. He can’t have seen me or her there.”

“Definitely never mentioned mind-invading aliens,” Zack says as he racks his brain. He should’ve asked more about that. He’d thought he was just respecting Cloud’s privacy but he should’ve—anything to do with R&D, he should’ve been asking. Even if it involved SOLDIER, he should’ve. “Not meeting Hojo either, I don’t think—though maybe Cloud’s mom. She worked for Shinra for a really long time and then got sick from the reactor up there, she can’t leave her house anymore…but I don’t know. I’d have to—I’d have to ask him. I don’t think Angeal knows either, and—okay, maybe Rufus knows, but if you think we should ask him—”

Sephiroth snorts. “I gave you the battery,” he says, gesturing towards that, and then he pulls out his own phone as Zack slides in the battery. “You can use our network to see if he’ll even pick up anymore. If he does, we can…I’m willing to assess first. If he doesn’t, then you’ll have to accept that he might not be capable of that anymore.”

With that, he uses his phone to share the network credentials with Zack. Who can’t quite believe his luck but who isn’t about to question it as he impatiently watches the reception signal blink and blink and then, finally, hold steady.

He still has that last message from Cloud up on the screen. His thumb sweeps over the letters, then—he grimaces and starts to write out a message, only to rethink it halfway through and delete it. Then he starts again, telling himself to get a grip and just get the thread restarted again, and—an incoming message blinks at the top of the screen.

Zack goes to angrily swipe it away, but as his thumb lands on it, he sees the sender: Aerith.

His thumb stays on the notification and a second later the app jumps him to her message. Which is stupid, he knows he doesn’t have time for this and he should just go back to the other thread, but something makes him pause to actually read it first.

i hope this reaches you i’m really not sure

It’s not like Aerith knows what’s going on, and if she and her mother are in trouble—Zack exhales a “fuck” and shakes his head. Then glances up to see Sephiroth raising a brow. He makes like he’s just thinking about what to say and looks back down, only to find that there’s a second message.

i can hear her now we both can and zack you need to remember

This doesn’t…does this sound like Aerith? She’s writing in a hurry, usually she’s very mindful about her punctuation even though Zack has tried over and over to get her to use lols and emojis, but does it still sound like her? That’s what Zack can’t help wondering now, and what makes him keep hesitating.

sorry momma’s hurting so i need to make this quick

she’s not you

please remember zack remember who you are

“I don’t—” Zack mutters to himself. He goes back and forth on what to do for one more second, and then makes himself close out of that thread and go back to the one with Cloud—where there’s a new message, which makes all the blood in his body turn to ice as soon as he reads it.

sephiroth never met her she’s my mother he’s going to kill her and i have to stop him have to find his

“Oh, shit,” Zack says.

Before he can stop himself, he looks up at Sephiroth, who immediately understands something is wrong. The man is across the space and has Zack’s wrist before Zack can so much as think about hiding the screen or smashing the phone. He reads the message from Cloud, then looks up.

“Lockdown, now. Tell the others to move out and we’ll catch them en route,” Sephiroth orders. That’s not to Zack or even to Vincent, who’s already jumping up onto the nearest forklift—did he grow wings?—but to Dyne, who pivots and starts calling orders to the others. Then Sephiroth whips back around to Zack. “Try to find out how close he is. He’s still typing, he can’t be transforming yet.”

“What—oh—” Zack starts to stammer. Then he sees the blinking dots and frantically messages back. Cloud, we need to talk. I don’t know.

His thumb hits ‘send’ by accident and he swears because he meant to put more in there, to remind Cloud, to try and come up with something amazing and beautiful that will just get the man to—to stop and just let Zack catch up. But honestly, that was probably never going to happen; he’s still trying but increasingly this just feels like he’s slowing down how fast he drowns. He’s never saving anyone.

And Cloud messages back: you don’t know her none of them do angeal never did either and he tried to stop me.

Zack exclaims at the ‘tried’ and then just stabs his finger into his phone, right over the icon to take it from the messaging app to a phone call. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sephiroth still hovering at his elbow, but the man doesn’t stop him; Sephiroth’s answering questions from the locals and giving out more orders. Anyway, as long as he’s going to let Zack try to reach Cloud, Zack is going to try. He’s got to try, damn it. He’s failing but he hasn’t failed. Not yet.

“Cloud? Cloud?” he says as soon as the call goes through. Then he stops and makes himself listen. It’s hard because the noises of everyone else are getting louder—now some of the equipment is being driven off—but he jams a finger in his other ear and concentrates. “Cloud, c’mon—c’mon—”

“…that Fair…?” comes a voice like it’s from somebody standing next to whoever has the phone.

They don’t sound well, and then there’s a series of fumbling and scrabbling noises like maybe there’s a fight over the phone. Zack swears again, thinking that Cloud might have just sent his—that he’s dead, and then comes a voice he recognizes.

“Zack!” Cissnei says. Panting, scratchy-voiced, clearly moving fast while she speaks. “Zack, listen, wherever you are, Strife is—”

Gunfire over the line, and out of the corner of his eye Zack senses Sephiroth stiffening. But when he wheels to check, Sephiroth isn’t eavesdropping on the shooting noises, but looking at something one of the locals is showing him on their phone. “Tell Barret to fall back, we’re not defending the Midgar team,” Sephiroth says to them. “Echo site and we’ll try to meet him before that but if not, there.”

“—not stopping, he’s not stopping and Hewley couldn’t—”

“Is he dead?” The words come out of Zack in a thick, stony wad. He’s still mad at Angeal but also he—just can’t think of Angeal—that way. “Where? Cissnei, where—”

“—wasn’t in the mine, all he said was she wasn’t there and he needs to find her to stop him—”

Sephiroth abruptly spins around and snatches the phone from Zack. He puts it to the side of his head but barely gets out one angry syllable before tossing it back at Zack. “Gone,” he says curtly. “You can come but no guarantees—”

“I know, I know!” Zack nearly yells in the man’s face. Then he falls back, just as the locals start fingering their weapons. He—he doesn’t have time but he has to make time, somehow, in some way. He has to make it, and then he has to make Cloud just—listen somehow. “Okay. Fine. But take me, he might—he might flinch—”

“I doubt it,” Sephiroth says, but he seems to have had his fill of talking and is already heading over towards a truck that’s just pulled up. “You two, escort him. Any minutes we can buy, we’ll buy by any means necessary.”

The two locals who flank up behind Zack look grim, but they don’t argue. Zack doesn’t try either and just hurries after Sephiroth. Once he’s jumped onto the back, he braces himself in a corner and tries not to look like he’s going to delay things. He just…

…he still has his phone. The call is over, but it’s still got reception. When Zack notices that, he shifts so that he can hold it against his leg, letting his hands stay visible but not the phone screen. He waits till the truck is fully loaded and starts off, and in the couple seconds that everyone is busy hanging on against the acceleration, he messages Cloud’s phone.

what happened to angeal

Then Zack sits back and tries to figure out what Sephiroth is planning. Whatever it is, it seems to follow some sort of prearranged protocol because there aren’t a lot of questions but no one looks confused. They all already seem to know where they’re going; even though Sephiroth crouches at the front of the truck bed and constantly peers over the cab, he isn’t really scanning the horizon for signs of fighting. Some of the others are doing that, but he seems to be looking for their destination, and since the driver isn’t throwing back questions at him, they also seem to know.

Also, it’s not just one truck. A couple others come out behind them, but once they’re a few blocks from the garage entrance, they go one way and the other trucks go the other way. More people going to the actual fight, Zack thinks, while they’re…falling back? Securing the line of retreat? Somehow that doesn’t really jibe with what he’s seen of Sephiroth so far, considering the man was willing to literally let the enemy carry him out on a stretcher to get where he needed to be.

So they’re going somewhere else, and Sephiroth…thinks Cloud is heading that way too, Zack guesses. But why—he feels his phone vibrate. It’s a message.

fighting and Zack almost forgets to hide his gasp of relief. But then more comes through: losing. cloud got away and not listening to anyone watch out if he comes after you. trying to kill all of us.

No, Zack tells himself as he swipes the messages off the lockscreen. No, it’s not going to be like that. No.

Chapter 32: Past

Once Heidegger’s seen the mangled remains of Hojo’s spy dressed up in Sephiroth’s uniform, he readily agrees to just take some scraps of the uniform that a cooperative local in the medical clinic tells him is all that can be safely sterilized. The rest of the body is tossed into an incinerator and Heidegger heads back to Midgar the same day, where he’ll hopefully be far more effective at snarling Shinra up in political infighting than he ever was as an investigator, a military leader, or a remotely responsible human being.

It should buy them some time. They need it, and not only so that Sephiroth can continue to review the files in Valentine’s hunting lodge and can find any other caches the man may have left behind. As desperate as Sephiroth is to finish simply understanding all of the connections here and ultimately how they will or won’t shape his and Vincent’s lives, he increasingly recognizes the practical reality of Shinra presuming him dead: he’ll have to replace their resources.

“Granted, their price was lifelong servitude at best, and treating me as exotic chattel when they didn’t think I’d notice. But I was building an entire elite unit,” Sephiroth tells Vincent one night over dinner.

Interspersed with their food are various maps, mining shift rosters, and inventory listings. The maps are directly related to Sephiroth’s attempts to further his mother’s work, but the other two are for figuring out how best to align with their new allies among the locals. Some of that is because they’ve persuaded the locals that the new mineral they’ve identified is dangerous if misused and that Shinra cannot be trusted with it, but a good deal of it has to do with the locals’ general objectives of greater independence from Shinra, and that centers around helping them siphon off some of the ores they’re mining for Midgar.

“Nobody asked you to set up a new SOLDIER,” Vincent remarks. He looks amused, but then he can: his involvement is largely limited to scouting and to clearing out monsters, since he continues to insist he hasn’t picked up enough science and engineering from his father to help much with reading the files. “Just to help them earn more money on the black market.”

“They’re nowhere near ready to stand up a militia anyway, whatever the hotheads among them think. Even Heidegger could figure out a winning offensive. Probably by bombing away anything useful too, but…” Sephiroth sighs and tries to make himself finish looking at the inventory listings so he can write the note Vincent will need to take to their contacts. Then he can go back to his current tranche of research notes. “We do need a base of operations. As far as I can tell from the latest core tests, you can’t reverse the effects of this ‘protomateria’ simply by removing it from the ground.”

Vincent nods. They actually went over this earlier, but the man never seems to object to repetition of facts. It’s probably partly due to his habit of watching Sephiroth for humanity cues; they’ve discovered he truly only needs blood, protein, and the occasional bottle of water, but he always sits through meals with Sephiroth anyway. Sometimes he even attempts to cook, now that they can get spices and fresh produce via the locals to go with any game he brings back.

“We have to figure out a better place to keep that too,” Sephiroth goes on. Admittedly, he’s developed his own habit of talking through his thoughts aloud around Vincent. He’d successfully made and executed plans for years and years without any such tic, but then again, he’s increasingly disdainful of any adaptation he can attribute purely to Shinra’s influence. “The other result I noticed was it’s already starting to affect the surrounding rock in the new location, even though we put it in a lead box.”

“I’ll check on it,” Vincent says. He goes out regularly to check on Sephiroth’s mother and his father and they’re not far off, so that makes sense no matter how much Sephiroth also itches to go there; Sephiroth takes down the occasional monster to keep his skills up but right now he’s more useful doing the research. “I think you’re going to run out of notes on that.”

Of course, every time Sephiroth starts to think Vincent is merely Chaos-bonded former Turk muscle, the man decides to flash another side of himself. “Meaning?”

“Father got frustrated—he had his ‘protomateria’ theory for years, even before I joined the Turks, but he had a hard time finding much on it. Didn’t seem to be just about Chaos, I think he said once. He did look at Cetra too but not much back then,” Vincent elaborates. His gaze drifts downwards but he’s searching his memory, not considering the documents between them. “It was…not always in the scope of his grant, and he had a hard time getting Shinra to let him look into much beyond that. And we were low on money after my mother died.”

Sephiroth starts to ask a follow-up, but then catches himself. Vincent flicks his eyes back up and regards him expressionlessly as he picks at his food, trying to…reconcile some increasingly common impulses he’s having around the other man. Of course he needs to know certain things to further their goals, and to ensure he won’t be put in a cell again by anyone, but also he’s…curious now. They’re learning each other regardless of the rational reasons.

“Did you support him?” he finally asks. “When you joined the Turks?”

A crooked smile flits over Vincent’s face. He’s well aware of Sephiroth’s continued animus towards his father, and some days he chooses not to answer this kind of question beyond ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ But sometimes he seems more settled in his own feelings and says more, like now. “More at the beginning, less later. He never asked, credit him with that, but I…my mother wanted me to look after him. I tried till it just stopped making sense to me—anyway, I remember he wanted to get his hands on some Cetra research from up north and down in the south. I paid for a couple trips we called vacations so he could visit other scientists, but when I stopped I don’t think he’d found much.”

There’d been that conversation Sephiroth had had with Valentine as well, where the other man had stressed how Hojo’s ideas about the Cetra had been wrong. Which Sephiroth has no problem with believing, seeing how much else Hojo had been wrong about, but…he grimaces. He’s been devouring everything Valentine has assembled but when it comes to actually perusing his own memories of the man, he feels strangely reluctant.

It's not as if he hasn’t had to force his way through personal feelings before to find the facts, he tells himself. But he…needs to work on that. He needs to find a way. If Valentine had found something critical that he hasn’t yet recognized, he needs to see it. And the man had specifically referenced the Cetra before he’d crystallized, which strongly suggested he had, even if Vincent can’t remember it or didn’t know.

“My mother was Wutaian. They had their own legends about the Cetra,” Vincent adds. Then smiles again, close-lipped, when Sephiroth blinks at his loquaciousness. “I barely remember much of it, they didn’t really bring me up like a Wutaian, but I remember that…but I think most of the—most of the Cetra researchers Father wanted to speak to worked on the Northern Continent. Not in Wutai.”

“That’s probably still true. They have more freedom up there—Midgar can apply pressure to the region via supply lines but still doesn’t have boots on the ground the way they do in Banora and Gongaga. But Wutai might have alternative sources, too,” Sephiroth says after thinking on it a moment. He looks at the inventory list one more time, then picks up his half-written note and adds the last few lines. Then he hands that over to Vincent. “We need more of a network, not just in Corel. If I need to find a way to travel, or at least to get credentials to access records elsewhere…Hojo didn’t actually destroy any research he didn’t like. He squirreled it away and pretended he did, but I think deep down he always was too insecure to just let go of it, in case he needed to adopt it. If he learned someone like your father was looking for it, that’s likely what happened.”

Vincent takes the note without comment, either on it or on Sephiroth’s thoughts. But a few weeks later, when they’ve heard the astounding news that Hojo has actually been removed from his position heading up R&D and replaced with the Banoran regional R&D head, Vincent slips in after Sephiroth has met with the local resistance leaders and passes over a ragged piece of paper.

It's a recruiting poster. It doesn’t actually name SOLDIER, but that does nothing to disguise its goals. It also still indicates that SOLDIER remains part of Public Security, but Sephiroth has long since convinced himself to stop feeling attached to that unit. He’d wanted to make it his, but it never had been, and now that he’ll likely be opposing its members he can’t be sentimental.

“Yes, they’re all very upset about it,” he notes as he and Vincent crest the top of a hillock overlooking the meeting spot. The locals know that he and Vincent are residing in Valentine’s old hunting lodge, but unknown to the miners, they’ve also established several fallbacks and they’ll be heading to one once the trucks are far enough away. The hillock will remove them from visibility while they wait for that. “Mostly because it’s making their children think twice about careers. This Hollander has barely even moved in and even if he has a reproducible method for churning out supersoldiers, he can’t stand it up in Midgar that quickly. I’d give it at least a year before you might have to face off against their new hero.”

The side of Vincent’s mouth quirks. He doesn’t say anything as they stop and Sephiroth holds up the paper just long enough to set fire to it. A second later, the last ashy remnants are curling up against the tip of Vincent’s boot or skittering away over the gravel as Sephiroth tamps out any stray sparks.

“I don’t think that one is coming here,” Vincent says, nodding to the patch of rock as if the brawny young man on the poster is still grinning up at them. “Chatter says Midgar wants to push over to Wutai, and secure materia ores once and for all.”

Sephiroth looks sharply at the other man. “And since when did you start running a spy network, Vincent?”

For an answer, Vincent drops soundlessly into a shallow scrape between two bushes, which is large enough for two. He doesn’t ask or signal for Sephiroth join him, simply waits for it. Typical of the man, Sephiroth thinks as he works his way in next to Vincent and then pulls out some food and drink. He’d intended to eat before they went to meet the locals, but had been too absorbed in some new core sample data, so instead he’d taken it with him as a snack to have on the way. And then he’d been too busy reminding the locals that of all of them, he is the one with actual military training and so if they want to start considering what a true Midgarian invasion would look like, they’d better listen to him.

He thinks they were. They need to, especially with a new version of SOLDIER—however long it takes to stand up, with whatever degree of quality, it will be stood up. Sephiroth has no illusions about that. Shinra had never seen him as irreplaceable, no matter how hard he’d tried…he pushes the thought away, taking a bite of food instead to satisfy his growling belly. He doesn’t particularly care now, after all.

“I still have family over there. I didn’t want to go to them before but there’s not much they can do to me now,” Vincent says. He pulls out a packet and then, when Sephiroth eyes it, unwraps it to show more food, which he slides into Sephiroth’s lap. “And no one left with Shinra that I care about. They liked Father, but they wouldn’t have done anything that might’ve helped Shinra.”

“That seems like a fair position,” Sephiroth says. He picks up the food, then starts eating it rather than the portion he brought since it’s the choicer piece; he’d been too distracted on the way out of the lodge. “But is Wutai willing to help out two Shinra-engineered fugitives?”

“We’re dead, technically. Fugitives are presumed still alive,” Vincent answers dryly. When Sephiroth snorts and offers him the water bottle, he takes it for a small sip, but then holds it between his knees as he stares out where the locals are driving off. “Wutai isn’t. But certain people there can be asked for favors here and there, in return for supplies. Some of them aren’t relying just on their old warrior customs to defeat Midgar.”

Wutai is already one of Corel’s biggest black-market customers so that won’t be too difficult to arrange. Though Sephiroth does consistently pause to assess whether he’s becoming too entangled with tangential goals, since none of this was planned—oh, he still is a strategist, and now is one who can actually see the tangible results of his decisions on a regular basis, even if the scope is far more limited. But that can be seductive in its own way, too, unfurling different opportunities with every achievement—very unlike his time at Shinra, where he had had an excruciatingly narrow path to walk and any deviation wasn’t merely a detour but was likely fatal.

Though whenever he’s tempted to settle, he usually is sent a reminder that he still can’t afford that luxury. Jenova is still out there, and Sephiroth knows better than to dream that with Hojo’s exile someone will unknowingly settle the matter by destroying her, too. He’ll have to do that himself before he can be certain that he’ll never wake in an icy sweat, will never suddenly double over clutching his screaming mind, will never need Vincent to drag him out of sight till he can master himself again.

Vincent knows that too. Sephiroth looks over at the other man. “You’ve been working on this since we talked.”

“You were thinking about it before that. If another like you comes, they might track down my father and your mother, and we’re not set up here to fight them off,” Vincent says, calm but blunt. He sips a little more water, then lets a few drops spill over his lip in surprise when Sephiroth touches his arm.

Then he lowers his arm. He doesn’t blink as Sephiroth fully wraps his hand around the man’s wrist, but Sephiroth can read him well enough these days—without relying on Chaos as an intermediary—to tell that Vincent had expected a different reaction. Vincent always expects the worst, and that increasingly irritates Sephiroth.

“Spy network, as I said,” Sephiroth mutters. He tugs at Vincent’s arm, then again when it becomes clear that Vincent won’t resist but also won’t take the cue. When the bottle is near enough, he reaches over with his other hand, slivers his fingertip on the tip of Vincent’s claw, and then swirls the blood welling out of the cut into the bottle. Vincent has been with him most of the night so he knows the man hasn’t had anything besides water. “You’re right. I still can’t figure out how to move them—all we can do right now is hide them as best we can, but we can’t get at Jenova without traveling. But I can’t…I haven’t found out how to do that yet.”

It still feels odd to say things like that out loud. To admit to…weakness. And yet, at the same time, it comes easily enough that when Vincent simply watches him do it, it seems like insufficient recognition—it makes Sephiroth impulsive. Pushing back the bottle with his bloody finger resting on its mouth, tilting his head to see how Vincent’s pupils dilate. He’s provoking without reason, they both are well aware of that, and no matter what Vincent’s instincts are, the man has proven he doesn’t need drugs to keep from rising to the bait.

“We have to stay. Dig in here, till I can learn more,” Sephiroth says. He pulls his hand away but no more than that; their bodies have shifted closer, now touching at the hip, and in all honesty, Sephiroth doesn’t want to drive the other man away. He exhales slowly and makes himself see how much of this is due to displaced frustration. He can’t help feeling that but it shouldn’t be what drives him. “But I’m going to. Now that the protomateria isn’t in there anymore, the distribution doesn’t change as frequently—I’ve almost mapped it and if we at least have a map, we can tell the others where they can dig and where they can’t. We can make the traceable footprint smaller, too.”

Vincent still has the bottle just beneath his mouth. A smear of blood is visible on the rim and his eyes are fixed on it, but as with many things, that’s merely window dressing with him. “You’re not going to turn into my father just because you’re staying here with them.”

“The Cetra or whoever made the protomateria would have to have even more influence over me than Jenova to do that,” Sephiroth snorts, but the joke tastes too sour in his mouth. He takes up his own bottle and drinks from it, then puts it down. “If there are people in Wutai who’ll take your messages, I’m surprised you’re still—”

“Don’t be,” Vincent says, and when Sephiroth looks at him, he drinks the bloody water. Slowly and deliberately, and when he’s finished the entire bottle, he carefully wipes off his mouth with a finger that he then laps clean.

“Why not?” Sephiroth asks. Still frustrated, but finding the needle of his own thoughts somewhat lessening as he watches Vincent.

“Because you’re not turning into your mother,” Vincent says in that same dry monotone. Then he actually allows himself a low chuckle, lowering the empty bottle to the ground and looking off into the distance. “I came back here, I let my father put me underground for almost two decades…you can go if you need to. You know I’ll stay and watch them, both of them.”

“But you won’t get them out of that crystal,” Sephiroth points out. He shifts restlessly in his spot. His stomach isn’t growling now and the trucks are at the very edge of his hearing now so there’s nothing for Vincent to look at over there. There’s also little to distract Sephiroth from how much of his frustration is due to Vincent rather than the situation, and how much he’d like to make the other man—to be certain Vincent sees what he does. “You’d wait for me to come back and do it. You wouldn’t be like you were either, just trying to sleep it away in the mine.”

Vincent dips his head in seemingly absentminded acknowledgment, as if his off-handed vow doesn’t carry the weight it does. He knows, by now he should know Sephiroth wouldn’t even let him sleep—and once again Sephiroth finds his impulses overrunning him as he twists over and ducks his head, seizing the other man’s lip between his teeth.

He does catch Vincent briefly by surprise, but after the initial grunt, Vincent simply turns and kisses back, and the warmth of the man’s response startles. Sephiroth fumbles, bites at his own lip by accident, and Vincent ends up taking his head in both hands to steady the kiss. To make it kissing and not a power play, to make him twist a little more out of that old mold and into this new, still-forming one.

It's odd how much Sephiroth only wants this more and more, and how he never wanted it at all before he had it: this companionship, this connection, this entire idea of not only intimacy but wanting intimacy. As strange as him working through Corel’s underground opposition to Midgar to build an alternate power base—as him deciding to stay here and coming to terms with it. It’s odd and yet it is what they end up doing, both of them. Vincent might need a cue but when his hands splay across Sephiroth’s skin, they do so without hesitation. With their own warmth as well as seeking out warmth, long fingers teasing the blood up to the surface as they reacquaint themselves with Sephiroth’s shape.

They finally take off well after it’s safe to do so, so by the time they reach their fallback, it’s almost dawn, with mists sloping up from the valleys to make the mountainside feel like the side of an island. The spot is a roofed dugout hollowed out of the rock skirting an overhang, just off the sightline leading up to a back entrance into the tunnel complex where Sephiroth’s mother and Valentine are trapped. Valentine or someone else tried to block off the entrance with rocks about thirty yards in, but seepage is slowly washing the in-fill out and anyway, though the entrance is farther than the one Sephiroth and Vincent had used to leave the place, it’s better for eventually ferrying out human-size chunks of crystal.

So they’ve fortified it instead. A reasonable decision at the time and one Sephiroth still stands behind, but as he crouches in the dugout, he does ask himself whether he’s surrendered more than he’s changed. He will not give up himself, or his mother—and these days, he thinks, Vincent slips in there too—but at least at Shinra he’d always had the dream of one day standing on his own. That might have been its own illusion, but there’d been a certainty to it that he finds absent now.

Rubbing at the side of his neck, then shoulder over the scars that are slowly creeping down over it. They’re healing better these days and haven’t noticeably affected his swordsmanship, but he does need different things now, he thinks as Vincent brushes past his back to check something on the dugout wall. And are these needs better, or are they only—

I wanted to run too, whispers his mother. So soft and yet so…determined, the way she always tries to reach him. She’d been trying for his entire life, he now realizes, and to be that stubborn in the dark and with no path to freedom herself—he catches his breath, and only then notices that he’s sagged forward to press his forehead against the side of the dugout. Wanted to run, to say I was saving him but I was running as much…from what I felt…

It wasn’t your fault. Hojo did it, Hojo wasn’t trying for you at all, Sephiroth thinks back at her.

He doesn’t deliberately think that it was Valentine’s fault as well, for being Hojo’s target but being too naïve to guard against it, but his mother knows his thoughts without having to force her way into his mind. She doesn’t take offense and only wraps him in a wave of regret-tinged amusement. He didn’t know, my son—I never told him I loved him. I ran…ran from all of it…ran because I didn’t want to believe what I felt, I wanted only to believe in what I could study. I told myself it was science, only science…

Which is very close to something Hojo would say. And Sephiroth hates the thought as soon as he has it, flinching as he tries to claw it down before she can tell. His mother doesn’t deserve to be linked to that—that filth.

But I ran to that. I ran there and I worked with him, with Hojo. It was a mistake because I was afraid but it was what I did, his mother says, because of course she knows anyway, and never even blamed him. Then she stretches out so he lifts his head, startled even as the sense of a phantom caress against his cheek fades. You were never only science, never only a…a means…I couldn’t ever…I regret not telling you. I wanted you to know I loved you…

Sephiroth inhales sharply, bringing his head up and twisting it blindly—and then he grunts, barely stopping himself from lashing out as Vincent pins him up against the dugout. The other man releases him but stays crowded over Sephiroth, staring down at him. “What? Did you feel her trying at me?” Sephiroth snaps, annoyed at having the—the distraction.

“I…didn’t think so, but you look like that only when Jenova’s trying,” Vincent says. He moves back, a rare uncertainty in his eyes.

Then trust Chaos over his rusty social skills, Sephiroth nearly snaps. But his mother’s already gone, too weak for either of them to overcome, and he can’t lay that at Vincent’s feet. He can’t—he lets his head fall back against the wall, then rubs at his face as that carved-out feeling in his head, the one he always has when adjusting to just himself in there, slowly dissipates.

He can’t run away now, that was what she’s shown him, and he can’t regret that either. He did without her but now that he has her, he needs her. That was what he had to remember, and now, to apply where he has others.

“No, my mother,” Sephiroth says, looking up. His head still feels mushy but his thoughts aren’t, even if he has to make the effort to pry them free. “No new information, she only was reaching out. Anything from your father this time?”

“We don’t talk like you and Lucrecia—never did, that’s nothing new,” Vincent says with a shrug. He settles back, then blinks once, surprised, as Sephiroth switches sides to come to his. He will creep and hover but when it comes to initiating more, he never does and that irritates Sephiroth too—but this is how they are, and irritation is how Sephiroth knows he hasn’t grown to detest the man. “Just the sense that he’s in there. Don’t think he regrets what he did—he’s not hammering at me to undo it, anyway.”

“Small mercies,” Sephiroth offers, and then lets his arm drape naturally rather than detouring it from lying partly on Vincent’s thigh. “I want a couple cores while we’re here. If everything is stable this week too, then I’m…I’m going to start thinking about how we can take in an excavator. That crystal isn’t physically blended with the rest, it’s very distinct from the other rock.”

Whether it’s linked in a psychic or other way that prevents them from moving Sephiroth’s mother and Vincent’s father remains to be seen, but Sephiroth can’t avoid finding out. And if moving them has any kind of effect on him…he’ll still try it. He has to.

“I’m not leaving empty-handed,” he says, and when he thinks he detects a feeling of surprise in Vincent, he can’t quite help the frustrated noise. “And if I left, I would come back. And before we even resort to that, I’d—we’d discuss it first, I wouldn’t simply assume you’d—why you’d even think I could abandon—”

“Probably because I’ve thought about it,” Vincent shrugs. “I think most people would.”

“I thought your model of humanity these days was me,” Sephiroth mutters. He glances over the edge of the dugout, then flexes his legs and arms without rising. They’d only come down into the dugout to drop off some supplies and his head feels whole again, so they should retrieve those cores. “It should be me, given the other options. And I am not thinking of leaving you, Vincent. It never even entered my mind.”

Vincent looks at him, lips quirked. Then the other man starts to push himself up and Sephiroth—twists his arm around as Vincent’s own slides over it, grabbing that by the elbow. Pulling at it as Vincent looks back at him, first surprised and then that exasperating shade of resigned.

“You don’t need to make it better for me,” Vincent says after a moment. “I’ve…been outside long enough now, Sephiroth. The protomateria…I’m sure now what was it and what was me. I never was—”

“You were never better enough to lecture me, I’m certain,” Sephiroth says. Then he exhales, and when he breathes in again, he tries to do so more calmly. Impulsive is one thing, but foolishness is another, and if he had any margin for that before, he has none now. He knows who he is, that’s the one constant in all of this—even as he changes, as who he is…yes, that changes too but even as he does, he still knows. And he knows another thing too. “I’m not pandering to you. If I say I’m not leaving alone, if I drag you along with me, it’s not because I think there’s no other way. It’s because I won’t have it any other way.”

Vincent’s arm goes a little slack in Sephiroth’s grip, but the man stays as he is, staring down with no expression. But with intensity, almost as intense as those first few exchanges they’d had where, in retrospect, Sephiroth realizes that Vincent had been struggling as much to remember how to view people, life, anything outside of the tunnel walls as he’d been to understand what Sephiroth was saying.

They’re beyond that now, but there’s still that sense of Vincent recognizing the unknown before him, and having to think whether he will chance going into it, or instead curl back up in known misery—and he makes his choices yet again, as his mouth comes down over Sephiroth’s.

Sephiroth pulls at Vincent’s arm, then levers back against the wall with his other arm, pressing up into the kiss. He walks his hand past the elbow to the upper arm, then shudders and hangs from that grip as Vincent’s tongue laps between his lips. The other man’s free hand comes to cradle the side of his throat and he shivers again, feeling the tips of Vincent’s claws tracing over his scars. He doesn’t mind them as much these days; they’re never going to completely fade but then, the two of them are always going to be linked now anyway. And Sephiroth—he’d been wanting that without even understanding that, wanting more than only himself on a mountaintop. It’s a strength to always know himself, but without another’s recognition, another’s company, that peak is no better than a cell in the dark.

“Hope you weren’t betting on never visiting Wutai again,” Sephiroth grunts as their mouths slip apart. “I was supposed to lead that invasion. That was how I was going to take SOLDIER out from under Heidegger.”

They’re still close enough that Vincent’s chuckle has no trouble dropping directly into Sephiroth’s mouth. His hand is still against Sephiroth’s throat, and the way one of his claws dips inside Sephiroth’s collar, simple but intimate, makes Sephiroth wish for a moment that they didn’t have other business.

“You might still do that,” Vincent says. He moves back, then uses Sephiroth’s hold on his arm to help Sephiroth up. “Just not to Shinra’s benefit. I know people who would ship you an entire library for that.”

“Start working on people who can help ship my mother and your father somewhere safer,” Sephiroth says as he stands. No, it’s all their business, taking those core samples and planning out countermoves and coming to an understanding with each other. He needs to stop separating them like he would have with Shinra. “I will find Jenova one of these days, and then stop her for good. But not before I’m certain they’ll be safe.”

And that, Sephiroth thinks, is the way forward.

Chapter 33: Present

Zack completely expects Sephiroth to head out of town, or at least to Corel’s outskirts. That’s where you’d think a resistance group would have their main base of operations, well beyond normal security checks and with low risk that a Shinra loyalist might stumble on it. But no, they do a couple hairpin turns and end up going straight for the warehouse where Zack, Cloud, and Cissnei had been searching for Grimoire Valentine’s old files.

At the time, the manager had mentioned that the warehouse had underground levels but Zack hadn’t paid a ton of attention since they didn’t have to go down to any of them. He does now as the truck goes in a service entrance and promptly pitches down what feels more like a theme-park ride than a working ramp. It’s not that well-lit either, and even with SOLDIER-enhanced eyesight, Zack finds himself crunched down against the truck bed to keep his head from being bounced anywhere near the concrete ceiling.

And then he has to grab an anchor loop as the truck suddenly slews to the side and off the ramp into a small loading bay. He’s only just gotten his balance back when there’s a sharp smack on his shoulder: Sephiroth, jumping over him and down onto the floor.

“Coming, coming,” Zack says as his escorts start to unwind themselves from their handholds. He swings himself over the side of the truck, then starts warily after Sephiroth.

The other man is striding confidently across the bay, which is completely walled off from whatever else is on this level. He hops up onto a small platform and goes to the door at the end of it. “Stay here,” he says as he keycards open the door. “After I confirm, we’ll go up to level two and wait for Barret.”

Then Sephiroth disappears through the doorway as the others chorus an assent and take up guard positions facing the exit. Before the door closes, Zack glimpses a hallway but it doesn’t really have any special features. And there’s nothing really special about this loading bay either, aside from the fact that Shinra’s security systems must not work down here. He looks around, then raises his bare hands as one of his escorts gives him a suspicious glance. And then looks around again because he can’t do anything else.

His phone hasn’t buzzed again since Cissnei’s last message. There hadn’t been a lot of chatter between the locals on the way here either, so even though Zack knows they have incoming, he has no idea how many or what their status is, or what the status is of anyone coming after them. And he doesn’t—he doesn’t fucking hear anything else. No alien voices, no mind-control, nothing now to make him doubt his own senses.

He does still believe what Sephiroth had told him. But he has to ask himself why not him. Knowing damn well how crazy that is that he actually wishes he could hear someone else’s voice in his head right now, but if he did—if he did, then maybe he’d know what is actually going on with Cloud. Maybe he’d know what to say to the man when they see each other, or what to say to Sephiroth or even Angeal to get them to not write Cloud completely off.

And maybe that’s all just stupid. He has to think about that too, that maybe they’re right and more people are going to get hurt if Zack tries to get through to Cloud than if someone just takes the other man down. But he just—and maybe this is the way it works for him, he hopes so badly that it is—keeps thinking that Cloud wasn’t acting that way with him. Fine, okay, Zack has missed a lot of signs, and in thinking back, Cloud has been acting differently. But not so much that the man seems like a complete alien, that’s what he keeps coming back to.

There’s a sudden rumble above them that makes a couple locals snap to, but they don’t shift their positions. They wait till one local with a walkie-talkie ducks into a truck cab, has a quick conversation and then comes back out to say wait some more, and then they go back to, well, that. Good training, Zack can’t help but think: Sephiroth’s been busy with a lot around here, not just with fending off mutants from Midgar.

And…shit, Zack thinks as his gaze falls to his own hand. He’s a mutant—even if he’s from the good cell line, he has bits of this terrifying alien in him, and now that he’s seen what it can turn people into it, he can’t help a little shudder. He knew SOLDIER changed people, and he also knew that it wasn’t going to be exactly like they had on the recruiting posters, but he had always thought…even if he didn’t know what exactly happened, he’d thought that it was ultimately for the good. Stronger, faster, better able to help out others in emergencies—aren’t those all good things? Even if it does come from an alien, so long as he can take it and use it for the right reasons…and why can’t he? Why can’t they just figure out a way, or at least just try to—

Watch out!

It’s urgent, but so quiet that at first Zack thinks it was one of the locals hissing at him. But when he spins around, he gets sharp looks and a couple weapons pointed at him, but no obvious—he jerks short and starts to grab for the side of his head. Then stops that too as he—is this the same voice as in Valentine’s office? Is this how it works for him? How—

Two things happen: Sephiroth comes tearing back out the door at that end of the bay, and at the other end, somewhere back up the entrance ramp, screeching wheels abruptly end in an ear-shattering, ground-shaking crash. Some of the locals get knocked down to their knees—Sephiroth yanks one back up as he runs past them, barking tersely to guard the door on his way up the ramp.

His sword is out, and his free hand has the halo of an activated lightning materia around it. He doesn’t so much as twist Zack’s way, and Zack barely looks at his departing back when one of his escorts bangs him on the arm with a rifle barrel.

They gesture sharply to move back. It’s pretty clear that they’re not about to listen to anything Zack might say, and if Sephiroth told them anything about a deal, that’s not going to count either. But Zack can’t help looking back at the ramp entrance; when they hit him again, he starts edging towards them but doesn’t look at them. He figures if they want to hit him on the back of the head, then they can join the club there but so long as they aren’t, he’s going to see what he can see.

Which isn’t much. Smells are coming down the ramp—acrid burnt rubber and gas, hints of blood—and so are the sounds of some kind of fight. Clashing metal but no gunshots, and then there’s another explosion, not there, that makes everybody drop down to hands and knees. Cracks appear in the concrete overhead.

Somebody else sees the cracks and swears, then starts shouting about evac. Most of the locals go towards the door, not away for the trucks, and that gives Zack a chance to make a dive behind one truck. His escorts curse but another local calls out to them to forget it, to just come on, the elevator shaft on the other side is reinforced—so they’re going to take another way out? And they’re going to try going up to Barret to ship out something, from what they’re saying.

But that’s all Zack gets as they retreat through the doorway—Sephiroth left that open—and then slam it shut behind them. Which seems to cut off Sephiroth too, in case he’s losing that fight up there, but all of this seems so planned out that Zack—

The whole place rocks again and chunks fall out of the ceiling to smash more chunks out of the ground just a few yards from Zack. He hisses and gets down by the truck’s bumper, trying to peer through the growing clouds of dust and gauge whether he’ll have to get under the truck in a few seconds. That one crack isn’t just widening, it looks like somebody’s trying to widen it, like they’re hammering down from the top. Zack hisses again, then squirms around the front of the truck—nobody pointing guns at him on that side now—and tries the door handle. It opens so he yanks it out of the way and then starts to scan the inside for something, anything he can use—

Running, stumbling feet coming back down the ramp, just as Zack’s hand closes around a screwdriver tucked into the side pocket of the car door. He whirls around but the stride isn’t Sephiroth’s, it’s too short and light—then there’s another set of feet coming after it and this one is heavier and longer, so Zack does get the screwdriver ready. And then Cissnei and Angeal plunge out of the billowing clouds.

Cissnei’s missing her suitjacket and her dress shirt is smeared all over with dirt, rucked out of her pants and torn across one sleeve. She has a gun in one hand and a clip in the other, and when she sees Zack her eyes widen and her gun starts to come up—then she spins around. She ends up by the other end of the truck, putting that as a shield between them, but she’s not aiming at him as she frantically reloads.

Angeal had only been about two car-lengths behind her, but when she goes for the truck, he just slows down till he finally drops to one knee just a yard from Zack, one hand slapping to the side of the truck for support. He has blood all over one side and while his sword is in his other hand, nocks the size of Zack’s fist have been taken out of its edge, which—Zack steps back, but then can’t help diving forward and grabbing Angeal’s arm as the sword just slips from the man’s grip onto the ground.

“Shit,” Zack says. And he’s still angry at Angeal, he hasn’t forgotten, but first he doesn’t want Angeal to die and for the first time ever he actually has that thought, that Angeal might not just lose but lose that badly. “Shit, shit, okay—”

“Stop, st—” Angeal tries to pull himself up against the truck, and then to twist to push Zack away. Something splashes over Zack’s boots and from the smell he can tell it’s blood plus--shit, that’s a gut wound, he can smell it. “List—Zack, you need to listen. Listen to me, right now, just—I lied but you have to listen right now and everything I say is true—”

“Yeah, okay, let me just get you—”

“No. Listen,” Angeal says, and something in his voice makes Zack stop. Something…someone else in his voice, this echo behind it that Zack almost thinks is that woman again. It’s over too quick—but he heard her. Heard someone. “She—she told me—”

“Jenova?” Zack breaks in. He shoulders past Angeal’s blocking hand and gets his own under the man’s arms, then pulls Angeal over to the still-open truck door. He gets Angeal leaning against the footboard before stretching past for the man’s sword. He has to knock away the screwdriver—he’d dropped that at some point—to do it, but he gets the hilt.

“No—Ifalna,” Angeal grunts. He doesn’t even stop to ask how Zack’s heard of Jenova. “She’s—a Cetra, and she—knew I had something from Jenova, knew Hollander’d used Hojo’s old samples for us. Had to be that, he wasn’t—wasn’t getting results otherwise. But she knew—it was going bad. She’s how Gen and me—she was healing us. Wasn’t what she said, Zack, it’s what she can—can do. But she had to go slow and it—it’s killing her to do it. We didn’t tell anyone—not even Hollander. We didn’t tell anyone.”

More crashing metal and breaking concrete noises. Zack winces and checks over their heads and he can see some exposed I-beams now, just before the clouds of dust wash back over them. The air is so filled with it that he’s coughing, and can’t see the other end of the truck; he has to rely on his hearing to tell that Cissnei’s still there, breathing in quick, shallow gasps. “I think we gotta go—”

“No, listen—she fucking knows now,” Angeal says, grabbing at Zack’s arm. His grip is so hard that Zack has to stifle a cry, and definitely can’t stop himself from being dragged down towards the other man, not unless he wants to let go of Angeal’s sword. “Jenova, she fucking knows there’s more than one way to block her—Sephiroth figured out something too, I don’t know what but she sent Cloud after it to take it out and then—you have to listen, after that she’s gonna send him after—”

Zack hears but doesn’t feel his knees smack against the ground. Because he knows where this is going and doesn’t even need a voice in his head to tell him. “Aerith. Aerith and Ifal—”

There’s that sudden, still silence that comes down just before the target is hit, when all the hairs on your skin go up and electricity charges the air but nothing can move.

Nothing except Angeal, who suddenly surges out from between Zack and the truck. His knee slams up into the underside of Zack’s chin, sending Zack spinning backwards with stars spangled over the grey dust-filled air—and for a few seconds Zack can only watch in horror through the torn patch Angeal’s made in the dust.

Angeal took the screwdriver with him. He jumps on top of another truck and scrambles to the cab, then uses that as a springboard to leap out as a huge piece of concrete falls out of the ceiling, blood arcing out behind him. Something comes down with it, some—the hazy figure riding the concrete turns way too fast, flipping over its edge as Angeal throws his weight to skew it to the side. Now the concrete isn’t going to smash them down like Angeal was aiming for, but instead drags him down as they whip around a blade and fresh blood sprays out—

Zack cries out. He’s on his feet but his eyes close, he can’t—he can’t watch that.

But he can only stop himself for a second. And then he has to see, when the concrete’s slammed down and there are only dim, undefined lumps in the billowing dust behind Cloud.

The other man has Zack’s sword in his hand, up in perfect form to counter Zack and every bit of it is covered in blood. He’s breathing hard but doesn’t look shellshocked or confused or—or like it’s just empty space inside his skull. That’s Cloud staring out at Zack, and it’s him who grimaces over their raised blades.

“I’m sorry,” he rasps. “Sorry, Zack. But she’s my mot—”

“She’s a fucking alien!” Zack cries. He feels his stance waver and overcorrects himself, has to swing back like a fucking raw recruit as Cloud just stands there. Not taking advantage because it’s still him. It has to still be him. “Cloud—look—look, I don’t know but—I don’t want to do this. I want to know what’s going on but I don’t want to do this. And your—your mom—”

“She is my mother,” Cloud says with a small, sad shake of his head. He doesn’t shake anywhere else. “Ma was dying and then she got back up, Zack. She got back up, and now I have to keep them from killing her again. They all want to.”

“…Cloud. Cloud, please, just—look, I’ll go meet your mother, all right? I’ll go, and I can help you tell them if she’s really there or if it’s—if something happened,” Zack says desperately. “I’ll go with you, I just—I can’t hear her, I don’t know what you all are talking about so I can be a, a, test or something—”

“I know you can’t hear her.” More cracking noises above them make Zack flinch, but Cloud doesn’t so much as blink. And it is him in there, but it’s him as Zack has never seen him. He’s always been stubborn in that quiet underestimated way, stuck in place as others give up or break down, but this is that taken to…this is not him, Zack slowly realizes. Not only him. “She says she’s tried, but you’re…too little like her. So she can’t. And I’m sorry, Zack, because if you heard her you’d know she can’t die. We can’t.”

“Okay, but why—just go protect her. Don’t do this, just leave this and go to her—they’ll stop, I’ll help, okay, so you can just leave. You can leave and go to her, and they won’t come after you,” Zack says, and for a moment he swears, he swears that he sees something like hope rise up in Cloud’s eyes.

“Zack,” Cloud says, his sword dipping. Zack’s breath catches and Cloud’s face suddenly blanks out, and it just—it isn’t him. “You can’t hear her, Zack. She has to be the only mother.”

And then Cloud is driving in, low and brutal, with Zack’s sword. That’s not even an attack Zack has taught him—Zack’s thoughts spiral out in all directions as he wrenches Angeal’s sword up in a wild counter, only to nearly fall flat on his face as Cloud spins away from him and then he realizes as the bullets zing by where the man’s really going: Cissnei.

Zack slews around, things in his legs popping and snapping and none of that is right but he’s got to charge first, he’s got to get there—and he does, he does slam into Cloud from the side just long enough for Cissnei’s red hair to disappear under the truck. Didn’t have time to do it with his sword, had to use his shoulder, so he knew he wasn’t going to stop the man and he—he has to. He has to now, and as he thinks that he realizes he’s still screaming Cloud’s name.

He gets his sword back up, but Cloud is already jumping away, back into the dust. Everything from Zack’s left knee downward is on fire, but he forces himself through the pain. Grabs the side of the truck and uses it to pivot again, just in time for the fog to clear and him to see Cloud crossing swords with—Sephiroth, who looks worse for the wear too but who’s definitely still on his feet. The two men exchange a series of passes that Zack can’t even follow before spinning away from each other, sticky scarlet streaks painted over Sephiroth’s back and right leg. Cloud shakes Zack’s sword and bloody clumps of hair fall to the ground.

Sephiroth scrambles up onto the back of a truck almost as soon as he lands, then bends and grabs something that he flings out at Cloud: a handful of ropes. Then he jumps at Cloud as the other man is slashing those away, but what he can’t see because of the rope fragments and what Zack can from standing behind Cloud is that Cloud’s pulling another sword off his back: Cloud’s own.

Zack doesn’t want to do this. He doesn’t want to do it, doesn’t want to do it, doesn’t want to do it, he just wants his friends back right up to when he surges onto his good foot and pushes off it to come at Cloud from behind. He’s got Angeal’s sword twisted to take Cloud’s sword with the blade and he just wants to stop the man long enough—

Watch out!

Impossibly fast, Cloud turns. Zack’s strike misses him and Sephiroth goes straight past his back, missing him too, and before either of them can recover, Cloud has rammed the hilt of his sword into the ground. Using earth materia to enhance the blow so that the whole floor starts to crack; Sephiroth can’t even land all the way before he has to claw his way off crumbling pieces. And while he’s doing that, Cloud comes back off the ground and puts Zack’s own sword directly into Zack’s stomach.

Zack can’t even fathom how it feels—his mind just whites out. He just goes slack, hanging on his own sword as Cloud stares at him and if that’s his friend in there, his friend doesn’t look angry at all. Just…a little surprised, Zack thinks distantly. Surprised he tried.

“She’s the only one,” Cloud repeats.

“You—” Zack coughs on the blood suddenly flooding into his mouth “—can’t—just—listen—”

“She’s—” Cloud starts. And then suddenly he crumples.

The sword slides out of Zack’s body. His arm flaps down over the wound, not even because of reflex but because of gravity as he falls over. He watches as Cloud wrenches this way, then that, and then abruptly jerks up to look to the side and the way the man’s face is now—there is something in him, something completely inhuman, something that stretches and distorts his skin as it slithers around under it.

Cloud spasms forward a clumsy step, then pulls himself up with an effort. He looks like that cost him more than the entire fight, but he’s back in control, his skin not seething anymore. He gets his sword up—then has to overhand block as Sephiroth comes down on him again. The two of them crash down and the dust gets in the way, that and Zack’s wavering vision—then he sees a couple last things.

Sephiroth, sword-arm limp at his side and that shoulder spouting blood as he stumbles backwards. The oncoming arc of Zack’s sword, glinting so brightly that it hurts, and then a second, dark arc coming down from above. Some massive thing grabbing Sephiroth and hauling him away to safety as Zack’s sword smashes into the concrete instead, and then Cloud’s face twisted in frustration, right before the whole floor fails.

Everything fails. Everything. And nothing Zack has done has changed that—that’s the very last thought he has.

Chapter 34: Epilogue 1: Aerith

Aerith swallows back a little cry as Genesis slumps through the doorway, then rushes to throw her arms around him before he can fall to the floor. He grunts and twists, his hand coming up to grip her arm as she drags him inside and then kicks the door shut. “You should be gone already,” he mutters.

She tries not to look too closely at the dark red streaks his fingers are leaving on her sleeve. “I know. We’re packed, we started as soon as Angeal messaged but Momma had an attack and then they said there was a curfew, and no one can leave their Sector unless they’ve got a pass—”

Genesis heaves himself up against the wall. He’s covered in—she averts her eyes, only to end up seeing all the stains across the front of her dress. The bags are at the other end of the hall and they have the Cure Potions, but when she turns to go get them, Genesis catches her arm again. “Here,” he says, pressing a small plastic card into her hand. “You need to use it in the next two hours, before they lock me out completely. Wipe off the blood first.”

Aerith bites her lip, but starts to do as he says. But her sleeve is all soaked with blood now and she’s so tired and scared, she isn’t sure what to do for a moment…he sees that and croaks out a laugh, then gestures to a clean spot on his coat. “This is last season’s anyway, even if it was salvageable, I wouldn’t be pulling it out again.”

She looks at him. Then rubs both sides of the card against the spot, quickly, and as she does, she puts her other hand to his side where his clothes look the wettest and casts a healing spell. Genesis jerks, then snatches her hand up and holds it away from him, snarling even as the furrows across his brow relax a little.

“Don’t be stupid, Aerith. Goddess knows it’ll only waste more lives, and it damn well is what she’s looking for,” Genesis says. He pushes her away, then falls back against the wall. He takes a rough breath before he slowly twists himself over, towards the doorway, lifting his sword off the floor. “Take your mother and go. I sent the rest of my team off to circle from the back—”

“So they’ll find you?” Aerith says, unable to hide the shred of hope she feels. “You shouldn’t give up—just because Angeal—”

Genesis sneers at her over his shoulder, then draws himself up before the door. “Angeal chose his fate. There’s nothing to avenge—there’s only whether I’m strong enough to follow in his steps. Now go, Aerith—if the team sees you, they’re not going to protect you and your mother any better, not going to fight for you. They think this is a Wutaian sympathizer rathole and when they realize I’m not fighting their damned war anymore—go.”

Then they both stop. Aerith isn’t sure what Genesis feels—he’s never talked to her about it, unlike Angeal, only to her mother and her mother has never shared either—but what she feels is a sudden rush of cold from inside-out. Cold and darkness, and glimpses of a yawning hunger lurching out of it, coming closer and closer.

And then the screams—like the whole Planet is screaming, like all of them are pouring down on her head to fill up that hideous craving without noticing that they’re drowning her along with it.

She turns and she runs. Tears streak down her cheeks but she doesn’t look back, not even to say farewell to Genesis. She runs and she barely stops to take up the bags, turning with them into the other room and then yanking the door shut. She hears Genesis shout at something but doesn’t stop to make out what as she pushes a heavy crate across the door.

One moment to catch her breath. Then she goes for the trapdoor and throws it open, dropping the bags down into the old sewer below where a wheeled pallet is waiting. Another breath, and she turns to her mother, moaning and barely conscious since she woke white-faced with green veins trying to crawl across her eyes. Since they’d both known that Angeal wasn’t coming back, that Zack wasn’t ever going to answer that last message Aerith had sent—she throws her mother’s arm over her shoulder and hauls them down into the sewer.

They have to run. No time to think on where, just run.

Notes:

Rufus/Cloud is intended to be a genuine pairing and isn’t tagged because it’s a huge spoiler. I didn’t tag Angeal/Ifalna more because I am trying to be ambiguous about it (for now). I think it’s a valid read to see them as a couple or to see that as an example of Zack taking the cover story at face value again.

Chapter 35: Epilogue 2: Sephiroth

“…took them,” Sephiroth mutters, twisting his head restlessly against a strangely-shaped rock. It bows under the pressure, but then attempts to flatten the bridge of his nose as his thoughts straggle towards conscious—he remembers. “Tell me they’re—”

“Behind you,” Vincent says. Jamming Sephiroth’s head back onto that rock of a shoulder, since he never does bulk up very much when he’s not relying on Chaos, and then shoving his finger into Sephiroth’s mouth for good measure. “Stop moving. I still have half a Cure Potion left.”

Sephiroth grunts but settles, not because of the man’s words but because he can sense his mother nearby. They’re in a moving vehicle, the back of a semi, crammed up against a canvas-covered bulk that sings faintly whenever the tires go over a rough patch. More crates box them in and from the smell Sephiroth guesses it’s weapons and ore.

Vincent’s finger is bleeding as if the man has just slashed it, but the lips of the cut are softened like the wound has been reopened a few times. The Cure Potion is in his blood, not being pressed to Sephiroth’s mouth, which along with their surroundings gives Sephiroth a rough idea of how long he was out. He laps the blood because Vincent won’t take the finger out till he does, but when the other man is finally satisfied and lowers his hand, Sephiroth immediately tries to sit up.

“Your guts aren’t all in place yet,” Vincent cautions, but he only keeps his hands on Sephiroth’s sides rather than actually trying to stop Sephiroth. Then he removes one so that he can drink said Cure Potion, and as he does, Sephiroth notes the greenish tinge to his complexion. “He only stabbed me in the wing. Bleeds a lot but nothing to stuff back inside.”

“Those are where your extra arteries are. Even I don’t have enough blood to keep you from falling out of the sky if you sever one,” Sephiroth chides, but it’s half-hearted due to the level of exhaustion he feels. He uses just enough energy to flick aside the canvas and confirm that what’s under it is too wide to just be his mother’s crystal cell alone, then allows himself to slump back against the other man. “Strife knew we could move them, but he didn’t know where we had them. She still can’t pinpoint us. So long as someone back in Midgar keeps him away from their missiles, we’ll be able to make it.”

Vincent swigs some more Cure Potion. He does appear to have all of his limbs, but Sephiroth makes a note to check the man’s back as soon as he can find a reason to remove Vincent’s clothing. “I don’t think he’s going back to Shinra. Rufus got out with some of the Turks,” Vincent says in between swigs. “I do think Rufus picked up enough to know what to ask R&D when he gets there.”

“Not trying to recover Strife anymore?” Sephiroth asks, and when Vincent shakes his head, he puts his head back and considers the fallout.

Rufus and Sephiroth had never crossed paths during Sephiroth’s time at Shinra, so he doesn’t have firsthand impressions of the man. Plenty of second- and thirdhand accounts, but there had been Fair’s comment about Rufus having a personal attachment to Strife…which probably owes more than a little to Jenova. And that makes Sephiroth exasperated with himself, missing how she’s evolved over the years—missing the very long game she’s been playing. That her game is still aiming at the feet rather than the head is a spur to him to not underestimate her again rather than a consolation prize. Rufus would’ve been better than a low-level SOLDIER…but then again, Sephiroth is thinking like a person. He refuses to be her but he needs to consider her point of view.

“Even if it’s not an internal war, between that and the Wutaians, they’ll be stretched too thin for an immediate follow-up,” Sephiroth finally decides, only to have Vincent cough a little into the Cure Potion. He sighs irritably at the other man. “What else?”

“I think they took Hewley’s body with them—Barret started getting in clean-up reports, said nobody’s seen it,” Vincent answers. He puts down the empty bottle, then starts to dig in his pockets, only to raise his head again as Sephiroth reaches over to rub the smear of Potion off his mouth. “Chatter is Rhapsodos called off the offensive, told everyone to sit tight on the border and then commandeered a plane straight back. They did announce a curfew in Midgar.”

“Do they actually think the Wutaians can move that fast?” Sephiroth says skeptically.

Vincent shakes his head, but keeps his eyes on Sephiroth as he does. “Strife.”

“…but why would he go back to Midgar, if he’s not still trying to hide in Shinra?” Sephiroth has to ask. It makes no sense at all, even for an alien whose only understanding of humans is filtered through the minds she destroys. “He came here to try and take out Mother and your father, and now he’s going back—wait, Fair? Did anyone see what happened to him?”

For an answer, Vincent pulls out a phone and hands it to Sephiroth. Then he ducks under that and Sephiroth’s second annoyed sigh. He pushes aside the blanket from their legs, then starts to tug and cut at the bandages wrapped about Sephiroth’s midsection. When Sephiroth flinches and hisses, he lightens his touch but doesn’t remove it, continuing to examine the area.

It’s all knitted together, but freshly-healed nerves are always oversensitive. Sephiroth ignores them and Vincent as he puts the phone against Vincent’s shoulder and unlocks it. He’s not expecting the answer to his question to be on it and it isn’t, although he does learn from his messages that they’re currently headed south rather than west. That seems a little strange at first, but when he checks the last-known distribution of Wutaian and Midgarian forces, it makes sense. Even a leaderless army has enough explosives at hand to destroy this truck’s contents, and if they’re in such disarray, it’s better to be conservative about slipping around them, rather than the original plan of going straight to their allies in Wutai.

Better also to avoid the Wutaian vanguard. Sephiroth has spent ten years organizing regional opposition to Midgar from the shadows, but not so that he can end up coopted into the war, facing off against whatever poor fool Shinra elevates in Hewley and Rhapsodos’ place. Once his mother and Vincent’s father are safely placed, he intends to finally go after the true root of all their troubles—and just as Strife has learned what they’ve been up to, Sephiroth now knows exactly who to follow to find Jenova.

…he tried, my son…he tried and we all heard him crying out…

“Rest, Mother,” Sephiroth says without thinking.

But then he grimaces and lifts his head, even though she hasn’t said more. He twists around, then stretches his arm over Vincent and wiggles his hand under the canvas just enough to touch the crystal itself; he’s learned the Protomateria well enough to be able to sense emotions and sometimes the faintest of pulses and he relaxes when he feels affection radiating out at him. She’s so patient, still so much more patient than himself—ten years, ten years and still he can only make her prison a little less absolute. He can’t free her and yes, he knows full well that that is in part because she won’t let him free her, won’t let him do it and won’t stop Grimoire from shielding her from both Sephiroth and the dead Cetra. Not until they’re both certain that Jenova won’t take her the moment she’s out.

…almost…he was very strong, he almost shouted to the very heart…you heard him too…

And this exhausts her, he knows that. As much as he wishes otherwise, he forces himself to withdraw his hand and his mind. Sending her only his determination to end this, and then holding back his own cry as she slowly fades.

He has to wait a moment before he can do anything else, and even then, it takes the stray skitter of a bandage from Vincent’s hand to stir him out of it. He frowns, glancing down at himself, and then flicks the bandage away from Vincent. “I don’t need it now,” he says, and then tilts back his head to meet Vincent’s almost-expression with narrowed eyes. “I’m certain you put everything back in.”

“It wasn’t my specialty before and Chaos never bothered to learn,” Vincent says, which for him passes for affection. That and the way his palm slides across Sephiroth’s stomach, right to the hip where Sephiroth catches his wrist and puts his hand back. His lips loosen out of their thin line and he drops back alongside Sephiroth. “Said they didn’t find Fair either but they still had at least ten feet of rubble to lift out.”

“Well, if he’s under there, then…” Sephiroth pauses a moment, considering if it’s worth the bother of an opinion, and then goes ahead because this is Vincent, after all, and frivolity is not something the man judges him on “…that’s a shame. Hollander might have stumbled onto something helpful with him, but we didn’t have the time.”

“Lucrecia felt sorry for him,” Vincent says.

Observing, not judging, but even so Sephiroth prickles. Then he exhales and tries to direct his frustration to its real targets, thumbing up the messaging app so he can start asking for updates. “He didn’t even last a minute against Strife. Hewley held his own for over ten, and if Rufus manages to recover Rhapsodos…but then he’ll have to choose between Strife and Wutai running loose all over the western continent. I’d like to know how Fair came by his immunity, but I’m not going to base a plan on it.”

Vincent doesn’t reply. Sephiroth glances over a second later, but the other man has curled up with his head braced against the crate just a hair above Sephiroth’s shoulder. One good jolt from a pothole later and it’s dropped right onto that, with the rest of the man loosely shielding Sephiroth from the drafts coming through the back of the trailer. With their connection Vincent can no longer disappear completely from Sephiroth’s senses, but he can drop into such a stupor that he might as well.

It helps him heal faster, with less need for blood that’ll be harder to come by on the road. And he’ll be up the instant there’s a threat; he and Chaos both are still vigilant for any intrusion by Jenova, and occasionally can catch her even before Sephiroth does. All good, sensible reasons for the frustration seething in Sephiroth to lose its boil…but not exactly why he lets out a long, tired breath and dips to rest his forehead against Vincent’s hair for a few seconds.

Ten years. Ten years, and they’ve only just gained the first step. And such a close-run victory too: in this quiet, with only Vincent at his side and the crystal at his back, Sephiroth can admit that Strife could have beaten him. If Vincent hadn’t been there, if Fair and Hewley and the Turks hadn’t also been distracting Strife…and that worries Sephiroth. He’d been assuming that Jenova would be acting alone, with Hojo dead and his misguided obsession never reciprocated by her anyway. He’d assumed she hadn’t learned. But like him, she’s changed. Strife is no mere puppet, and has skills far beyond his SOLDIER grade. She let Strife learn them from someone, and from the way Fair had acted at the end, Sephiroth suspects that had been a shock to him, too.

And, a small, neglected but unforgotten part of Sephiroth says, a part that he deliberately hasn’t indulged since the aftermath of that first shattering attack on his mind: what if she learned that from him?

They’ll have to find a way around it. However she’s learned, they’ll have to learn better. He lets Vincent support him for another moment, then pulls himself back against his mother’s prison and turns to his messages. He’ll find a way.

Chapter 36: Epilogue 3: Cissnei

Cissnei looks up as a paper cup of coffee is pushed in front of her. She can’t help leaning forward as its inviting aroma spirals up into her face, but she forgets her arm is in a sling right up till it keeps her from reaching for the cup. Then she has to work that back down to lie flat, not an easy thing to do with the bandages swelling up her shoulder, and twist a little to get her other hand with its two splinted fingers around.

By then Rude has just sat down next to her. He keeps the cup in her reach till she can actually take it and doesn’t look annoyed about it, which just makes her even more embarrassed about taking so long. “Tseng wanted me to tell you there’s a bed free in the back,” Rude says.

“Thanks,” Cissnei mutters through her first gulp of coffee.

She doesn’t get up. Her legs are cramping, and so is her back; the seat is actually pretty well-padded, but the medics told her to try not to slouch since she probably has a cracked collarbone to go with her broken ribs. Actually, she’s supposed to be strapped into a brace or onto a stretcher, but even Rufus’ private jet doesn’t have room for that. Not when they already had to hack out most of the seats for the two gurneys locked to the floor a couple inches from her.

Some coffee slips between her mouth and the cup, and as she curses and jerks the cup away, Rude holds out a napkin. Cissnei remembers she hasn’t even thanked him and mutters one. Then tries to straighten up, only to have her teeth clamp down over a liquid wash of pain all through her.

When it finally fades, Rude is offering her some painkillers. She takes them, offering a thank-you up front this time, and he nods before reaching up to take off his sunglasses. He looks at them, not at the gurneys, as he finally starts chipping off the dried blood from one lens with his thumbnail. “Hewley’s pretty much gone, but Rufus wants to at least try and find Rhapsodos,” Rude says. “Thinks even a body’s gonna help there.”

“I don’t know how many brownie points this’ll earn us,” Cissnei has to say back. Both of the gurneys have makeshift ventilation tents over them, with so many wires and tubes snaking around that it’s barely possible to make out the shadows of bodies inside. But it’s funny, she thinks, how a shadow is still enough to make her jumpy when she can sack out for a nap next to a body bag without thinking about it. “Plus isn’t Scarlet already saying we should court-martial him? He just dumped a ceasefire on us without telling anyone and—”

Rude cocks a brow at her and she shuts up. Drinks more coffee. Yeah, not their job, that level of stuff. Let Tseng worry about it. They’ve got enough worries with…her eyes wander back to the gurneys and despite herself, she can’t help squinting till she can just make out a swatch of black hair through the tent’s plastic windows.

“Did you like him?” Rude asks.

From anyone else, that’d be asking whether Cissnei needs to go on involuntary leave. But it’s Rude, and he’s using the arm of his sunglasses to tap her hand with the painkillers she hasn’t yet swallowed, so Cissnei doesn’t clench up. She does pause and take the pills first, washing them down with coffee that seems to burn way past where her stomach is. It feels like right after her first mission, and she’d thought she’d completely forgotten that.

“It’s not why I dragged him out of there,” she finally says. She pauses again, twisting her cup between her fingers, before working up her hand to drag her two good fingers through her hair. Her splints catch and she grimaces as she has to tug them free. “Strife actually talked to him. He didn’t talk to anyone else—not even Rufus. He flinched but he didn’t—he talked to Zack.”

“Still, could’ve taken some pointers from Hewley in getting some swings in,” Rude says, maybe half as cutting as Reno would’ve been about it. “Or that other, what’s his name—I thought he was going to get Strife a couple times. Fucker kept ducking out of it, got to hand it to him—Strife’s harder to nail than a Sector Two cockroach.”

Cissnei shudders and then has to clamp her teeth again at what that does to her ribs. Rude glances at her and then finds a bottle of water from somewhere as an apology, which she accepts with a nod because he’s not wrong, and because she’s got to just…live with what she saw. They’ve got to keep going so she has to.

“I did…think he was funny, actually. Fair,” Cissnei admits after another minute. She drinks more of the coffee, and when she’s done, Rude puts his hand out so she gives him the empty cup. But she twists the cap off the water herself, pinning it between her knee and the seat to do it. “And I think sometimes he’d forget he thought all Turks are assholes and all SOLDIERs are the best, and was just being…but yeah, it didn’t stop Strife. He bent over backward for that guy and got a sword in the belly for it.”

Rude doesn’t say anything. Just sits with her in the back of Rufus’ plane, with the two gurneys and the buzz-hum-hiss of all the medical equipment.

“Where are we going?” Cissnei finally asks.

“Midgar,” Rude says, hooking his thumb at himself. Then he flips his sunglasses around in one hand to point at her. “But making a stop in Junon first. You’re going there, Tseng wanted me to tell you. With them. Since it looked like Fair liked you enough to listen. Rufus doesn’t want them in the same city as Hollander. Also we still don’t know where Strife is, but R&D’s got nobody there.”

Cissnei draws in a sharp breath. She can’t help but feel a little stung, even though she knows in her condition she’ll be more of a liability in a fight, and whatever the situation is now in Midgar, it will involve that. It’s only a matter of time before the news leaks that the war in Wutai has just gone completely sideways, with no leaders left in SOLDIER, and even with all his contingency planning, Rufus is going to have to work at coming out on top. And she wants to be there for that, he’s going to need the Turks for that and she wants to be where she’s needed.

But at the same time, she also feels—not relieved. She feels like this is better, like this is the reason why, at the end of the day, people like her and like Tseng stick with Rufus. If it’s going to be a power play in Midgar, then nobody’s going to be thinking about someone like Strife and they have to. Cissnei still isn’t completely clear on what happened in Corel, but she is clear on that: Strife will go up against anyone, any time, and if he wins—none of them can live with that. None of them can live if he wins.

“Tseng’s gonna brief more you when we’re closer. Wanted you to rest up first,” Rude adds. He puts on his glasses. “I’ll tell him you’re napping.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Cissnei says, and then puts her head against the seat as Rude gets up. She stares at the tent around Zack, watching the way it gently rises and falls.

Who Rufus has in Junon, she’s not sure, but they’re going to have their work cut out for them. If Cissnei is honest, both Zack and Hewley are basically brain-dead at this point. And if she really liked Zack, she thinks—if she really liked him, she’d go over there and pull the life support, then dump his body when nobody was looking, because whatever’s going to happen to him, it won’t be the Zack Fair she knew who gets up off that gurney.

But she doesn’t. Because Strife talked to him, she’d seen and heard that herself, and anything they can get against that…she doesn’t even want to call him a person. She doesn’t want to think about the actual body bags also on this plane, the colleagues who they’re not even having this discussion over because what’s left isn’t enough to let them do that. She just wants to know they still have a chance, the rest of them.

“Sorry, Zack,” she does end up saying, but then she steels herself and looks straight at that bit of hair inside the tent. “But I’m gonna be there with you when you see Strife again. I’ll make sure that happens, I promise you that.”